Artsy Quotes

[Steven Sweeney]

Irritability is the besetting sin of aging artists, as garrulousness is that of aging writers.

--from an article in the current New Yorker magazine, which recounts the anecdote that Winslow Homer tried to 'keep inquisitive ladies away from his outdoor easel' by posting a sign nearby that read "Snakes! Mice!"

[Steven Sweeney]

I am entranced when I have the privilege of access to a Vandercook printing press, such as those at many regional centers for books arts, under the wing of the Library of Congress' Center for Book Arts. What finally led me to this was probably the experience thirty years earlier, carving linoleum blocks for printmaking in a high school art class.

Now, though it's been years since I set type by hand, I'm still very keen on woodblock printing. (This is what I've been doing again lately.) If you live long enough (to make as many mistakes as I have), you begin to discover parallels in everything (the glorious benefit of living this long), and I thought I'd pass along an observation from George A. Walker, the author of an eminent introduction to woodcut artistry.

I think you can get away with a lot of drawing and color-match failures in art, including portraiture, but I'm familiar with very few successful artists who can get away with omitting what Walker is talking about here -- contrast. Whether it's white paper and black ink, or warm and cool temperatures in hue, or soft and hard edges, or gradations in value in an appropriate range, I have come to believe that contrast is the coin of the realm when it comes to paying your way in art.

Again, this is written to woodcut artists, but it's broadly instructive:

A central principle I always teach my students is the value of opposites. Heraclitus said two thousand years ago that art is shaped by the tensions that exist between opposites. "Harmony," he says, "needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman." This manifests itself in myriad ways: simplicity and complexity, drama and comedy, tradition and innovation, real and perceived, large and small, concave and convex, controlled and accidental, deliberate and spontaneous, to list a few. But of this interplay of opposites, none is more immediate than the contrast of dark line on light surface or light line on dark surface. Without the contrast, you see nothing. Simple as that.

[Steven Sweeney]

James Finley lived at a Trappist monastery under the instruction of Thomas Merton. In a recording of his book, Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere , Finley recounts this event, which so exactly described my experience in taking drawing and painting instruction, that I thought it worthwhile to transcribe it here for those who might be interested:

[QUOTE]I once attended an art class by Frederick Franck, who wrote a book called

[Karin Wells]

Ditto Steven, here's some more to expand on this:

All of us are watchers

[Steven Sweeney]

An extraordinary poem about light, featured on today's "Writer's Almanac." (For those not familiar with it, "Writer's Almanac" is a daily "literary moment" produced for public radio and distributed throughout the U.S.)



Light, at Thirty-Two
by Michael Blumenthal
from Days We Would Rather Know


It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how

[SB Wang]

"The perceptual and the rational are qualitatively different, but are not divorced from each other; they are unified on the basis of practice. Our practice proves that what is perceived cannot at once be comprehended and that only what is comprehended can be more deeply perceived. Perception only solves the problem of phenomena; theory alone can solve the problem of essence. The solving of both these problems is not separable in the slightest degree from practice. Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment."

Karin said something close to above paragraph.

[Steven Sweeney]

Comments from writer Elizabeth Gilbert ("Eat, Pray, Love") about times when lack of recognition and financial success in your creative efforts leaves you feeling resentful, discouraged or unappreciated: [QUOTE]