Saul Leiter

Taxi (1956)

“In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/arts/saul-leiter-photographer-with-a-palette-for-new-york-dies-at-89.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20131128&_r=0

https://www.artsy.net/artist/saul-leiter

Amy Sillman: shut up and paint

As paintings do, they have sat mute, engulfed in the noise of the critical sparring. Unfortunately, the instigator of this noise was the artist herself -- apparently so intent on talking the talk and walking the walk that she loaded her show with retrograde baggage and tangential impulses -- apparently afraid to "simply" make paintings. Don't get me wrong, the large paintings in this show are impressive -- muscular, layered, searching -- great color, dynamic spacial contrasts -- if only they were allowed to be themselves, purely visual statements -- not ideas about painting. 

http://stevenalexanderjournal.blogspot.ca/2010/05/amy-sillman-fear-of-painting.html

David Hockney

“I’ve been looking at this landscape here in East Yorkshire, Bridlington, and environs, for two years now rather closely, day in and day out, and I’ve never really done that before anywhere else,” he said. “And I realize that you keep seeing more and more, actually. Because you see with memory. Meaning, when I’m looking out over this vista—well, I was here last summer, in fact this is one of the first places I painted, but I hadn’t yet seen it in winter. But now I have, and this time I am watching the summer with the winter in mind. 

...

“I’m sure this winter I will see more as well, informed as my memories will have been by yet another summer. And then the same for next summer. In fact, it’s almost impossible to imagine truly painting landscape without staying put for a long while. Constable hardly ever left Suffolk, and just think of everything he saw!”

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2008/fall/weschler-david-hockney/

www.marakorkola.com

No place 300

Robert MacFarlane

"landscape is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant - a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us...it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident."

http://landscapism.blogspot.ca/2012/06/robert-macfarlane-holloways-old-ways.html

Elizabeth Bowen

"It is those periods of existence which are lived through carelessly, unwillingly, or in boredom, that most often fructify into art."

Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.