Category: Uncategorized

 "…there is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel. The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed, just to have his fellow-men know the delight and the passion which the sunset had created in his soul. And yet, is it not this mystic pain — the pain of not being known — that gives birth to art and artists?"

                                                                                                                    –– Kahlil Gibran

[via]

On creating art in a time of turmoil, Maria Popova, editor of the provocative blog "Brain Pickings" suggested that there needs to be:

…a commitment on behalf of the artist to serve not only truth but beauty by remaining in contact with the timeless and the eternal; to fortify us against the urgencies of a turbulent present and embolden us to transcend our primal reflex of fear, so that we may lift not only our spirits but the whole of our consciousness and continue to evolve toward a more humane humanity. This has always been the duty of the artist…

[via]

"Whether you are trying to be right, like the realists, or trying not to be right, like the Dadaists, …. the art you make will always be subjective and askew. If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place."

                                                                                                      –– Kathryn Schulz "Being Wrong" 

In art school, photographer Harley Weir pushed back against the predominant mind-set favoring intellect over intuition in self-expression:

“It was frowned upon to do something that was good looking or less considered, more intuitive,” she says. “But I don’t like the idea of coming to an art project knowing what you want — for me, I find photography a way of learning, to figure something out with an image.”

[via]

The aim of art is insight, understanding of the essential life of feeling. But all understanding requires abstraction. The abstractions which literal discourse makes are useless for this particular subject-matter, they obscure and falsify rather than communicate our ideas of vitality and sentience. Yet there is no understanding without symbolization, and no symbolization without abstraction. Anything about reality, that is to be expressed and conveyed, must be abstracted from reality. There is no sense in trying to convey reality pure and simple. Even experience itself cannot do that. What we understand, we conceive, and conception always involves formulation, presentation, and therefore abstraction.

                                                                                                                    –– Susanne Langer

[via]

Artist David Hockney reflects on how our perception of the world may be determined, in part, by what we choose to pay attention to:

"I do get a deep pleasure from looking," he says. "I mean, I can look at a little puddle on a road in Yorkshire and just have the rain falling on it and think it's marvelous. … I see the world as very beautiful."

Every work of art expresses, more or less purely, more or less subtly, not feelings and emotions which the artist has, but feelings and emotions which the artist knows; his insight into the nature of sentience, his pictures of vital experience, physical and emotive and fantastic.

                                                                                                                    –– Susanne Langer

[via]

"Work is self-expression. We must not think of self-expression as something we may do or something we may not do. Self-expression is inevitable. In your work, in the way that you do your work, and in the result of your work, your self is expressed."

                                                                                                                         –– Agnes Martin

[via]

From a recent article in the NY TIMES about photographer William Eggleston:

 He either takes one photograph of his subject or no photographs of it. There is never a moment of internal consideration or indecision — there is only certainty — which explains why he has no favorites: “Each one, to me, is equal, or I didn’t take it to begin with.” Eggleston can find the perfect gem without ever having to even sift: “I never think about it beforehand. When I get there, something happens and in a split second the picture emerges.”

“It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life; he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he cannot have it, must despair. The burden of the mystery must be with him day and night.”

                                                                                                                                        –– Goethe

[via]