By Julia Cameron
"I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow." p. 65 "In my experience, the universe falls in with worthy plans and more especially with festive and expansive ones." p. 65 "Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility." p. 62 "We're much more afraid that there might be a God than we are that there might not be." p. 63 "We say we are scared by failure, but what frightens us more is the possibility of success." p. 66
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"Kate McCarthy’s sculptures and paintings are soft distortions of the everyday, bent through the lens of emotional memory. Through these translations, her art depicts an interplay of emotions, textures, colors and forms. By painting playful creatures, armchairs, and bathtubs, McCarthy gives the viewer a chance to see how our feelings might change the way we look at our everyday items."
From Matthew Rachman Gallery Artist Statement
Link "Chicanx, Punjabi, Hawaiian: weaving is about strange combinations. Teal penetrates magenta. Gold interrupts. Handspun wool twists with glitter, only to get trapped in cotton. As my mother likes to say when she sees a surprising multiracial body: “who invaded that guy?” Materials erase, seduce, replace, choke as they wind their way through a warp, under weft, are put under tension or are set free of it. 3/8 Indian. 1/8 black and white. Authenticity diluted by eighths! What are you? I am a weaver of ends, of each generational end. I am a promiscuity of culture in rayon and knit caught in the warp of a backstrap loom, picking out the pattern in a Mapuche poncho. But are these my stories to tell? I am Hollywood Hawaiian. My work is a tribute to my grandmother Lawhaii (Kikume) Johal. That’s Hawaii with an L. She grew up believing her family was native Hawaiian. Her uncle was Chief Mehevi, Chief Rakos, the authenticating bodily presence of the savage and of the exotic in the jungle movies of the 1920s-50s. What are you? Check the box. Are you human? Type the code. The “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (CAPTCHA) is the puzzle that compels me to choose as I navigate the web. Prove you’re not a robot. But there are too many seams, too many constructed cultural affiliations sutured together. This is the performance of the unassimilated without homeland: please check one box only. Mark yourself as Other." "The actions of Deana Lawson, Aperture, and Frieze raise critical questions about the relationship between living artists and scholarly, critical apparatuses. Do artists understand the clear benefits of myriad views of their work? Is it possible that Lawson and those who would serve as her makeshift publicists are not the best interlocutors for her work? I was an artist and graphic designer before I became an art historian. Even decades after making my professional shift I know that I am not the best interpreter of my visual work.
Such rejections also bring up questions about the editor’s relationship to both artist and writer. Who should have the final word on the writer’screative work? Despite the protestation of the artist, critics and scholars often provide important insights that change how we understand an artist and her oeuvre. A wonderful case in point is Michael Lobel’s essay on Richard Prince’s early work. Not acquiescing to Prince’s disavowal of his early production, the art historian wrote the piece he wanted to write, and the Neuberger Museum, which published the catalog, supported Lobel’s endeavor. The final essay appears with holes where the artist’s images would have been. We should do things like this more often." From Hyperallergic. "You are the master of your own universe. If you can't stop, don't stop."
Link From The New Yorker
www.owenslaura.com “'I don’t believe there’s such a thing as innate talent,' she said. 'It’s about desires and passions that lead to a focus on certain things and seeing the world in a certain way.'” "In a journal that Owens kept in her early twenties, she wrote a fourteen-point list entitled 'How to Be the Best Artist in the World.' Among the dictates: 'Think big,' 'Contradict yourself constantly,' 'No Guilt,' 'Do not be afraid of anything,' 'Say very little,' and 'Know that if you didn’t choose to be an artist— You would have certainly entertained world domination or mass murder or sainthood.'” “'Send your poems out into the world,' she told a girl who said that she wrote poetry—and resilience. 'When you make a mistake, see what’s good about it,' she said. 'Mistakes are little windows into what is possible.'” "'it’s a matter of hearing the work, after walking past it all day.'” "Gestural and color-field abstraction, digital imaging, American folk art, Japanese landscape, children’s-book illustration, dropped shadows, greeting-card whimsy, clip art, wallpaper design, silk screen, tapestry, typography, stencils, recorded-sound elements, and mechanical moving parts (in one series of paintings, shapes with hidden motors function like clock hands) take turns or combine. Slam-bang visual impact co-occurs with whispering subtlety. Owens’s art imparts a sense, from first to last, of being in the middle of a process that doesn’t evolve but that spreads, deltalike, from a mysterious headwater." "You know at a glance that they are by Owens, not from their looks, which are miscellaneous, but from how they feel: vaguely familiar and acutely strange. The works often suggest to me the state of mind of a new mother too tired to think while too dedicated not to work. Owens confirmed the impression in an e-mail: 'Being a mom and still making art involves absolutely opposite parts of your brain. One is really selfish and the other is absolutely selfless.'” "Her works sell briskly to devoted collectors but less well on the investment-minded secondary market, which favors reliable product lines." Interview with Hyperallergic.
"'Go ahead; you can write whatever you want about me,' Jonas Wood says. 'Everyone knows I’m a stoner,' he adds." "He checks what I am photographing, and asks me not to post shots of work in progress, or of his source images, hung copiously along one studio wall. He even takes my phone and starts flipping through the camera roll, while I try not to panic about anything sensitive in there." "His paintings have that packed energy — the layering of pattern; the dynamic, odd interiors — and yet a balanced ecology of compositional geometry. He uses his own photography and appropriated images, sometimes manipulated, to make his paintings. His subjects include sports-related scenes, domestic interiors, and paintings of vessels and vases." "'I have had a deep emotional connection to most of the places I select to paint. That is going to come across. There is a personal nostalgia I can feed off.'" "'I had a conflicted childhood, so there is energy within the existence of each room. I pick things that stimulate me, whether they come from a positive place or a negative place. I use it in a therapeutic way, partly. I am reanimating those experiences in a beautiful way, working through both the painting issues and the stimulus.'" "The seductive wall installation presents a tableau of canvases hung salon-style on striped wallpaper and slowly reveals itself to be one painted piece, destabilizing our perception of what is. The work thus challenges us to reexamine what is absolute, resolute, and neutral, and explore both the limits and potentiality of representation."
On "It’s Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain’t Nuthin’ Left" Link "Christina Quarles’ paintings are sensuous studies of human entanglement, which display a dazzling range of painting styles and an uncanny sense of inside-out space. Working with a bright spectrum of color that sometimes bleeds into the raw canvas, Quarles deploys a broad range of creative tools, including brushes, combs, rubber forks, X-ACTO knives, tape, and odd-ball utensils from 99 cent stores. The figures are painted from strong memories, rather than live models or photographs, which results in works with a haunted or active sense of timelessness." From Jessica Silverman Gallery Link |
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