“[t]he poet has one more duty that explains his devotion to form: his debt to his predecessors, to those who created the poetic language he has inherited.”
“A poet’s attitude toward his predecessors is more than a question of genealogy. We do not choose our parents: it is they who choose us by giving us life.… Whatever we may think of ourselves, we are they, and they must be able to understand us if we want to understand ourselves. The more they leave to us, the richer is our language, the freer we are in the choice of means, the finer is our ear—our method of cognition—and the more nearly perfect is the world we create by ear.”
12.29.2015
10.27.2015
Our Valley
“You have to remember this isn’t your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.”
— Excerpt from Our Valley, by Philip Levine
Travel
“In front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatever,” [Matisse] wrote to his daughter, Marguerite, in 1929.
The French Modernist found aesthetic sustenance in Morocco, which he visited twice between 1912 and 1913. Indeed, Matisse often turned to travel whenever he felt stymied as a painter.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/
The French Modernist found aesthetic sustenance in Morocco, which he visited twice between 1912 and 1913. Indeed, Matisse often turned to travel whenever he felt stymied as a painter.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/
To Paint Is To Love Again
“To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.”
— Henry Miller
8.21.2015
Street art celeb Banksy
“I’m lucky because what I make either succeeds or fails. Some people undoubtedly would tell you that’s why it’s crap art, but that’s the way it is. I feel sorry for Abstract Expressionists—how do they know when to go home?”
- Street art celeb Banksy in an interview with Juxtapoz magazine about his new show, Dismaland
http://gawker.com/banksy-on-aesthetics-1725323846
2.06.2015
John Cage to Philip Guston
When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave.
pp 171-172 Night Studio, A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer, Da Capo Press 1997
pp 171-172 Night Studio, A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer, Da Capo Press 1997
1.07.2015
Vincent Van Gogh
Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)