This observation by author Annie Dillard may be applied to any creative endeavor – it's really the motivating force that not only keeps artists creating but humanity searching:

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

After 17 memorable and rewarding years, we closed the gallery earlier this month.  Though I will no doubt continue to capture photographs of the unique and intimate landscapes of the Shawangunk Ridge, I feel this photographic chapter has been completed.  Many people have asked why I made this decision and, though there are many reasons, no one expressed it better than 18th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron when asked the same question:

    “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.”

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

                                                                                                                –– John F. Kennedy

This telling observation by Ralph Waldo Emerson, applied to creative endeavors, speaks to the powerful notion of sidestepping the intellectual and yielding to the emotional:

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety … and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.

[thanks BP]

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

                                                                                   – Tilda Swinton

Here's a provocative excerpt from a letter written by American painter Georgia O'Keefe that speaks to the mysterious nature of the artistic impulse and the necessity of trusting it:

Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing…

[thanks, BP]

The artist lives by perception. So that what we make is what we feel. The making of something is not just construction. It’s all about feeling… everything, everything is about feeling…. feeling and recognition!

                                                                                                            – Agnes Martin

[thanks BP]

I believe I've posted this Garrison Keillor excerpt previously but I laughed when I just re-read it so here it is again. It speaks so well to the distinction between art as an intellectual tidbit and art as a meaningful, pre-cognitive connection between artist and audience:

A couple weeks ago I watched a tenor in a gondolier's outfit stride out on a stage and sing to an immense outdoor crowd "O Sole Mio" and "Torna a Sorrento" and "Finiculi-Finicula," three old cheeseballs that no serious singer does nowadays, and when he hit the big money note at the end of "O Sole Mio," that crowd jumped up as if bitten by badgers and yelled and whooped and whistled. I loved that. Serious artists seek to create challenging work that leaves the audience stunned, thoughtful, even angry, but what we the audience want is the pure joy of a man aiming at a very high note and hitting it squarely and us jumping up and yelling. A simple reflex, same as when the opposition hits into a double play in the ninth inning with one out and the winning run on third.

A provocative excerpt from the book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard:

The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise… I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

[thanks BP]

Those involved in creative endeavors often describe the process as one of tapping into something greater than themselves, nicely described here by writer Anne Lamott:

When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.”