A new quotation to add to my list of favorites:
“The moment you create something you no longer have complete control over it. The book belongs to the reader, the painting to the viewer, the song to the listener, and each of those people’s reactions is as valid to them as the intention is to the artist. When you share a piece of yourself you lose hold of it, and in that something greater is born.”
Francesco Marciuliano
A good friend recently introduced me to the artist Gunther Gerzso (6/17/15-4/21/00). His paintings are fascinating, as is his story. A quote from an interview with Jose Antonio Aldrete-Haas that resonates with me:
“I don’t care what my paintings represent- my emotional matter appears in them. That happens without me having to worry about it, because when I am painting i only pay attention to the technical issues.”
This is my current favorite quote….absolutely right on. I have it mounted on my drawing table, and read through it every day before I begin working.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anyone who will listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
Chuck Close
“I don’t go to the studio with the idea of “saying” something.
What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few marks on it
that start me on some sort of dialogue.”
Richard Diebenkorn
“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”
― Ken Robinson
“Never be so focussed on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
Ann Patchett, as her character Dr. Annick Swenson in STATE OF WONDER. The character is actually referring to scientific research with this statement, but the idea is 100% applicable to making art, not only those who do intuitive/experimental art, but to all artists.
I listen to audio books when I drive, and last week I was listening to DUNE by Frank Herbert, and heard this:
“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace. Those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the patterns of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. ”
I pulled over and copied it down, and have been thinking about it ever since. It puts into words what I have come to realize is the content of my work, what I am constantly attempting to express. My work (and my life, for that matter) is a continuous search for order, for the underlying patterns of life.
Years ago a good friend and I discussed frequently a mutual “problem” we had…….disorganization. We were constantly coming up with new strategies for getting organized, for getting everything in our lives under control by discovering the perfect plan and structure for our lives. And the joke at the end of each of these discussions was that if we ever accomplished this goal it would probably mean the end of life……why go on once one’s goal was fully realized. What was there to strive for beyond perfection? So it was lucky that our goals had not been reached, as we felt that we each had a lot of living to do.
The Herbert quote goes on:
“Yet it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.”
My understanding of the full implications of the final part of the quote will require a great deal more consideration.
In an earlier post, a listing of Demons that plague all artists, I mentioned success as a frequent stumbling block. On the surface it seems strange to consider success to be a potential issue, but there are two particular aspects of success that can cause problems.
1. Falling in love with a part of your painting early on in the process. The danger is that the dynamic of the painting process can change from the successful completion of the piece as a whole to protecting that fabulous part of the piece. The first thing you need to do is be aware of this possibility so you can recognize when it is happening. Secondly, take a photo of that section so that you can store it for future consideration, thus freeing yourself from the fear of losing it. Then continue to work on the piece as a whole, retaining that section or not, as the painting requires. Take the time later to study the photograph to determine what it is that you liked so much about it and hopefully the answers to that question will become stored in the right side of your brain and come through again…….in an entire painting.
2. Winning an award/getting into a prestigious show/words of praise from someone you respect….. potential stumbling blocks if this leads you to limit your work to repeating the same “successful” pieces. I am not referring to working in series and exploring different aspects of a particular idea, I’m talking about becoming tied to what you perceive to be a successful “formula” and hesitating to step outside that proven formula for fear of not being successful.
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.” Pablo Picasso
“Don’t carpet your rut.” Gerald Brommer
There are many fears that plague the artist, but the most debilitating is the fear of failure. Much of this type of fear can be traced back to that kindergarten teacher telling you that you were wrong when you painted the sky green instead of blue. More goes back to the belief that there are “rules” for making art. Still more comes from the mistaken belief that a good artist, an artist with true talent, doesn’t ever make any bad art.
The only way around this problem is to recognize these 2 realities:
1. When it comes to making art, THERE ARE NO RULES and THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG involved.
How can this be? How about all the Principles of Design? What about balanced compositions and complementary color schemes and the rules of perspective? They are all observations/suggestions/considerations/ideas that are good to be aware of and will sometimes come into play as you create, but THEY ARE NOT HARD AND FAST RULES. Name any design principle, and I will show you a dozen pieces that successfully defy that principle.
So if there are no rules, if there is no right or wrong, how can you fail? Easily. By making art that does not please your own sense of what is good art. I will discuss this issue in upcoming posts, but simply put, you need to determine what it is that YOU find pleasing/compelling/meaningful in art.
2. Every artist…..EVERY ARTIST….makes some bad art. Every artist has failures, and in reality each failure adds to your body of experiences. You learn from every failure. As I mentioned in an earlier post, in order to become a good artist you need to do hundreds of paintings (or drawings or whatever), many of which will be failures. The secret (one of the few art secrets there are) is to avoid the inclination to get angry at yourself when you fail, or to berate yourself for your lack of talent, but rather to consider why you feel the piece is a failure and to file that information in your mental file of art experiences. I also get around the issue of feeling that I have wasted materials by saving and either repainting or repurposing every failed piece. (Fortunately, I have a lot of storage space in my studio.)
What I am saying is this: Get out there and just make art. Don’t be such a baby…..so what if you fail? Get a big trash can for your studio.
If you won’t believe me, consider the words of these three great philosophers:
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. James Joyce
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Wayne Gretzky
Judith Bergerson / JackPine Studio 