Came across some fascinating explorations of what it means to be an "artist" excerpted from "Daybook: The Journal of an Artist" — a collection of journal entries by artist Anne Truitt.  She delves deep into her own psyche in an attempt to learn what drives her to create and whether that makes her special:

This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that artists are, in this sense, special because they are intrinsically involved in a difficult balance not so blatantly precarious in other professions. The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.

[thanks Brain Pickings]

Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist of the 1960s, declared:

“Organized perception is what art is all about.”

Came across some provocative excerpts from a book written in 1897 by Leo Tolstoy entitled: "What Is Art? –– part of our ongoing investigation of emotion, or "feeling" vs. intellect in the creative process.  Tolstoy makes the case that the test of art is whether it creates emotional resonance:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.

[thanks, Brain Pickings]

Came across an excerpt of author Rebecca Solnit's book "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" and was intrigued enough by the theme of the book to order a copy.  Her book about photographer Edward Muybridge, River of Shadows, was excellent and I'll look forward to her musings on creativity:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since.

[thanks, Brain Pickings]

Having a bad day?  Perhaps it's all for the best.  In an interview that appears in An Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists, The late Francis Bacon, considered Britain’s greatest living painter at the time of the interview in 1972 made this provocative observation:

But I feel ever so strongly that an artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or for the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

[thanks Brain Pickings]

From an letter written by Van Gogh about the importance of honesty in art:

Do you know that it is very, very necessary for honest people to remain in art? Hardly anyone knows that the secret of beautiful work lies to a great extent in truth and sincere sentiment.

[thanks, Brain Pickings]

Photographers who chase storms always seemed to me to be just geeky thrill-seekers, but I'll have to reconsider after reading a portion of an interview with Mitch Dobrowner in which he describes his motivation:

I have always loved just sitting out in nature, hearing the wind blow and watching the light changing. I study the light and see photography as an exercise in painting with light and shadows. In inclement weather, light and shadows are always changing. … When I’m out there I always hear the mantra spoken by Edward Abbey, “Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”

(thanks Dish)

Time and again artists, when asked about creativity, describe giving themselves over to an indefinable muse –– one that leads away from preconceived notions.  Here's an excerpt on that subject from Pablo Picasso:

Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

(thanks Brain Pickings)

The Library of Congress announced Thursday that the nation's next poet laureate will be Charles Wright, a retired professor at the University of Virginia.

On whether his sources of inspiration have changed over the decades:
Not really. It's always been the idea of landscape that's around me, that I look at; the idea of the music of language; and then the idea of God, or of that spiritual mystery that we doggedly follow, some of us, all of our days, and which we won't find the answer to until it's too late — or maybe it's not too late. Maybe it's just the start, I don't know.

(Thanks, NPR)

Asked their opinion of the art world, many will complain they don’t understand it, referring to the conceptual nature of many contemporary works.  Clearly one facet of art should be to provoke thought — to have the viewer think or apprehend the world differently. However reliance on intellect to “understand” art is often responsible for the tortured logic artists rely on to defend their work.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic’s piece “512 Hours” opens in a London Gallery this week and consists of nothing but an empty room and the artist. Though it has already had the effect the artist may have been seeking –– controversy and subsequent discussion — Abramovic’s defense of her idea of a gallery with nothing in it sounds like a clip from an old episode of Seinfeld:

“From my point of view, it’s difficult for anyone to claim nothing,” Ms. Abramovic said dryly. “I think it’s a misunderstanding anyway. It’s not that I’m doing nothing — quite the opposite. It’s just that there is nothing except people in the space. But now we are getting letters every day from people who did nothing first. It seems to have become something.”