"For me, art is the experience of what you’ve felt inside."

                              ––  Hossein Sabzian

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Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits… The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

Jiddu Krishnamurti sums up perfectly the artist vs. the technician:

You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter… We have technique…how to put up a house, how to build a bridge…how to educate our children through a system…we have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty… Creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing… So, having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.

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There is another world, but it is in this one.

                                              – W. B. Yeats

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter…to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring…these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

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The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

 "I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that…there are not too many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human being… I want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens, and to get there I practice…I’m a prolific practicer, I still practice every day. You have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you’re playing, that’s when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days, but you want to get to this place where they exist."

                                                                                                                                 –– Sonny Rollins

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The meaning of life is to be outside on such a beautiful day

                                                       — Gertrude Stein

Musician David Byrne echoes one of the primary themes of this blog, namely that creative endeavors which succeed in engaging an audience work on a level that is separate and unique from our intellect:

Both art and music seem to bypass the rational and logical parts of the mind — rather, they are understood by myriad parts of the brain that are connected to one another. It is a different kind of understanding. The effect of this interconnection is pleasurable, ecstatic even.

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A still image from our 23rd year of capturing the midnight ball drop at One Times Square…