Blog Archives
(To mark the publishing of Pearls From Artists* # 500, here is the very first PFA originally posted on August 15, 2012) Pearls from artists* # 1
Utah road
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And hopefully I will carry on, and develop it, because it is worthwhile. Carry on because it matters when other things don’t seem to matter so much: the money job, the editorial assignment, the fashion shoot. Then one day it will be complete enough to believe it is finished. Made. Existing. Done. And in its own way: a contribution, and all that effort and frustration and time and money will fall away. It was worth it, because it is something real, that didn’t exist before you made it exist: a sentient work of art and power and sensitivity. That speaks of this world and your fellow human beings’ place within it. Isn’t that beautiful?
Paul Graham, Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult
How prescient! Graham’s words are apropos of how I think about this blog nearly ten years after I started it!
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 465
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn proposed that if art has never been revealed its intrinsic “function” to us, it is because such a thing is beyond our ken. For the Russian writer, we are mistaken when we call art a human innovation; we ought instead to see it as a gift, something that came to us from beyond the bounds of our world. Solzhenitsyn illustrates his point by comparing the work of art to the technological marvel that a man from the proverbial Stone Age comes across in the wilderness. Unable to penetrate its secrets, the man can only turn the object this way and that, looking for “some arbitrary use to which he can put it, without suspecting an extraordinary one.” Solzhenitsyn goes on:
“So also we, holding art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters, boldly we direct it, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement… and at another… for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives us a part of its secret inner light.”
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 446
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What stops us in our tracks? I am rarely stopped by something or someone I can instantly know. In fact, I have always been attracted to the challenge of getting to know what I cannot instantly categorize or dismiss, whether an actor’s presence, a painting, a piece of music, or a personal relationship. It is the journey towards the object of attraction that interests me. We stand in relation to one another. We long for the relationship that will change our vistas. Attraction is an invitation to an evanescent journey, to a new way of experiencing life or perceiving reality.
An authentic work of art embodies intense energy. It demands response. You can either avoid it, shut it out, or meet it and tussle. It contains attractive and complicated energy fields and a logic all its own. It does not create desire or movement in the receiver, rather it engenders what James Joyce labelled ‘aesthetic interest.’ You are stopped in your tracks. You cannot easily walk by it and go on with your life. You find yourself in relation to something that you cannot readily dismiss.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 436
View from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Cassirer’s partial definition of art as symbolic language has dominated art studios in our [20th] century. A new history of culture anchored upon the work of art as a symbolic expression thus came into being. By these means art has been made to connect with the rest of history.
But the price has been high, for while studies of meaning received all our attention, another definition of art, as a system of formal relationships, thereby suffered neglect. This other definition matters more than meaning. In the same sense speech matters more than writing, because speech preceded writing, and because writing is but a special case of speech.
The other definition of art as form remains unfashionable, although every thinking person will accept it as a truism that no meaning can be conveyed without form. Every meaning requires a support, or a vehicle, or a holder. These are the bearers of meaning, and without them no meaning would cross from me to you, or from you to me, or indeed from any part of nature to any other part.
… The structural forms can be sensed independent of meaning. We know from linguistics in particular that the structural elements undergo more or less regular evolutions in time without relation to meaning, as when certain phonetic shifts in the history of cognate languages can be explained only by a hypothesis of regular change. Thus phoneme a occurring in an early stage of language, becomes phoneme b at a later stage, independently of meaning, and only under the rules governing the phonetic structure of the language. The regularity of these changes is such that the phonetic changes can be used to measure durations between recorded but undated examples of speech.
Similar regularities probably govern the formal infrastructure of every art. Whenever symbolic clusters appear, however, we see interferences that may disrupt the regular evolution of the formal system. An interference from visual images is present in almost all art. Even architecture, which is commonly thought to lack figural intention, is guided from one utterance to the next by the images of the admired buildings of the past, both far and near in time.
George Kubler in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things
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Pearls from artists* # 406
With “Avenger,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” image, 70” x 50” framed
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If we really are due for a shift in consciousness, it is incumbent upon each of us to “be the change,” in Gandhi’s famous phrase. Nothing is written in the stars.
Art is a testament to this way of thinking, because every great work of art is made, not for an abstract audience, but for the lone percipient with whom it seeks to connect. The symbols that compose artistic works are not static objects but dynamic events. As such, they can only emerge within a field of awareness, that is, within the context of a life being lived. It is therefore by approaching the work of art as though it were intended specifically for you – as though the artist had fashioned it with you in mind every step of the way – that you can turn the aesthetic experience into an engine of change in your own life and in the lives of those around you.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 383
“Sentinels,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 38” x 58” image, 50” x 70” framed
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… I mean to say that a work of art is a gift. The gifted artist contains the vitality of his gift within the work, and thereby makes it valuable to others. Furthermore, works we come to treasure are those which transmit that vitality and revive the soul. Such works circulate among us as reservoirs of available life, what Whitman calls “the tasteless water of souls.”
Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
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Pearls from artists* 381
Barbara’s studio with work in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
A work of art, if it is art, is not an end but a beginning. It is a challenge to the artist who produced it and to the artists around him to take the next step, to answer the questions raised by the work, to achieve what he or she has yet to accomplish. It also represents a challenge to the non-artist, who is offered a fresh vision.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 374
Barbara’a studio
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Finally, [John] Graham said, of all the arts, painting was the most difficult because one false move on a canvas could mean the difference between a great painting and a failure. A writer could always resurrect a word, but a line or a shape was so ephemeral that, once changed, it was almost always lost for good. “To create life one has to love. To create a great work of art one has to love truth with the passion of a maniac. If society does not perceive this love, perhaps humanity will.” …The artists… came away… feeling as though they were not aberrations but part of a long tradition of individuals who had ignored fashion to create culture.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 351
Barbara at work on “The Orator”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
That art is apolitical does not mean that artists themselves can be excused from the political responsibilities that fall on others. It means rather that as a manifestation of eternal psychic force, each work of art goes farther and deeper than the limited perspective of any individual mind, including that of its author.
No artist can predict how his work will affect the world… The artist invests his entire personality into the work, but he does so as a means of expressing a vision that is transpersonal. Everything that makes him what he is informs the work, but the final result transcends all personal contingencies.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 348
“The Orator” in “Worlds Seen & Unseen” at Westbeth Gallery, NYC
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The percipient apprehends the primal quality of art as beauty and symbol, in an experience that invariably involves a sense of radical mystery. Art dissolves the fog of Consensus in which we normally operate to reveal the unseen in the situation. It places us in exactly the same position as the first people who stared up at the stars in wonder. The work of art is perpetually new; it demands reinterpretation with each era, each generation, each percipient. Great works of art are like inexhaustible springs originating from a place beyond our “little world of man.” They reconnect us with a reality too vast for the rational mind to comprehend. Therefore, art can be described as the human activity through which our all-too-human mentality is overcome and in light of which all finite judgments are shown to be inefficient. It is at once a sinking to the source and a leap toward the infinite.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
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