12.16.2014

Matisse Cutouts

At first, Matisse worried that working with cut paper was cheating—a shortcut to painting—and he kept it a secret. “It is necessary not to say anything about this,” he wrote to his son Pierre, in 1931. 
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/moma-cutouts-sophie-matisse?int-cid=mod-latest

10.28.2014

Cecily Brown

Something that’s just glimpsed seems more real than something that’s fully described.

7.10.2014

Sherwood Anderson

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

4.07.2014

Jack Chambers

Painting is a calculated response to perception.

http://www.aci-iac.ca/jack-chambers/biography

3.17.2014

Randall Jarrell

What a pity we didn't live in an age when painters were still interested in the world.

2.18.2014

This is the Life

...
What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising.
...

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?


By Annie Dillard 
from the Fall issue of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, published by the Center for Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University. 

1.21.2014

Simonides

Poema pictura loquens,
pictura poema silens

Poetry is a speaking picture,
painting is a mute poetry

Horace

Ut pictura poesis.

As is painting so is poetry.

Valery

In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one's life depended on them . . . there we find what is called 'living.'

1.14.2014

Craig Raine

All bad literature aspires to the condition of literature.  All good literature aspires to the condition of life.

from "Poetry Today"

1.11.2014

Horst Bredekamp

Ideas come through drawing.


A Very Rare Book: The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo's pivotal treatise, by Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, December 16, 2013 p63

1.07.2014

Chard de Niord

nature is an idea and not a place

www.charddeniord.com/index.php?/projects/what-the-animals-teach-us/
"What the Animals Teach Us" published in the Harvard Review, Push Cart Prize XXII, 

Picasso

It's magnificent to invent new subjects. 
Take van Gogh: potatoes, those shapeless things! 
To have painted that, or a pair of old shoes! 
That's really something!

–Pablo Picasso
Craig Raine, "Originality in Poetry" Haydn  & the Valve Trumpet Faber and Fabre, 1990