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

Walking

St Francis of Assisi said ‘Solvitur ambulando’– it can be solved by walking.
— Excerpt from Pathlands, by Peter Owen Jones

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/story/20151023-joseph-cornell-the-man-who-put-the-world-in-a-box?ocid=global_culture_rss&ocid=global_bbccom_email_26102015_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