Changing Perspectives

I was reading Deborah Barlow's blog yesterday [Slow Muse, link here] and she had a couple of quotes by the wonderful Jane Hirschfield, found in Psychology Today. Thanks Deborah for these quotes, they really spoke to me.

"What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless."

"I suppose I’m saying that good art is a truing of vision, in the way that a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. And that anything that lessens our astigmatisms of being or makes more magnificent the eye, ear, tongue, and heart cannot help but help a person better meet the larger decisions that we, as individuals and in aggregate, ponder."

boat stage, 2014

stage curtains/bow of another boat, 2014

Quiet Time

I was reading Deborah Barlow's blog Slow Muse [link here] the other day and these words expressed so well what I have been thinking about.

John Russell‘s admonitions feel even more necessary now than they did then:

I think that art should be allowed to go private. It should be a matter of one-on-one. In the last few years, the public has only heard of art when it makes record prices at auction, or is stolen, or allegedly withheld from its rightful owners. We need to concentrate more on art that sits still some place and minds its own business. We all hope for a strong response from art, but the kind of buzz that we have to live with nowadays is the enemy of art. Quietness and slow time are its friends.

A retreat from the outer world of garden and land, the sense of hibernation, the longing for quiet, for calm, for watching; a place I need to be now as I take the time to update my website. Details, fiddlely bits, organization, the figuring out of the puzzle, how to present things clearly, time to make mistakes, time to fix them; the sense that there is enough time and I will get it done. But I know I need full concentration and a letting go of where I'd rather be which is the studio. And I know, really, this is part of the studio.

Last night's sunset on the pond

Exploring

 All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.

Chuck Close via Deborah Barlow in her blog Slow Muse

I had never read this part of of a longer quote and it came at the right time. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. I love this as I love to explore, to see what happens. I can get to caught up in wanting to get to the end of the exploring and actually start the work and then I sometimes remember these lines.

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

T.S. Eliot -- "Little Gidding" (the last of his Four Quartets)

Here is some of yesterdays explorings of right angles and blocks of color

held , 2013

held 5, 2013

held 7, 2013

held 9, 2013