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Excerpts from an interview with Funhouse Magazine. "I love the idea of an image being able to represent what can only be imagined." "I keep two sketchbooks, a neat one and a messy one. The messy one is where I come up with ideas and whatever crazy things I need to put down. The second is where I do detailed drawings, both personal and for commissions and roughs for future work. This way I feel like I can have stages to the way I work and feel like things get developed." "Colour is always something I like to start with, for some reason it gives me an idea of what the image is going to look like. Then I think about the theme, context etc.. And look into the main idea for the image. For example with the blood type article, I was looking at old textbooks for inspirations as well as abstract patterns."
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instinct + skill both benefit greatly from practice The secret of successful art-making is... - curiosity - creativity - risk - hard work (discipline) - resourcefulness - embrace glitches/accidents, process - & persistence Some quotes... "For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest." "...to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender..." "Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea." "Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown." "Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss." 13 Artists Give Advice to Their Younger Selves
By Alexxa Gotthardt https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-13-artists-advice-younger “Take images of your different studios all the way through your life. You will be so happy to have these photographs later.” - Idris Khan “Ask for what you want. Have courage.” - AA Bronson “Don’t panic when nothing is going on in your career…it’s the best time to work—unencumbered and with no deadlines. Just figure out how to stay alive and appreciate those periods of freedom. That said—don’t panic when you’re not working. Every experience, interaction, relationship, trip is changing your brain and your vision and will influence your next project. Trust your ideas… work through [them], don’t turn away. Self criticism is one thing, self-sabotage is another.” - Laurie Simmons “It just took me so long to believe in the kind of artist I turned out to be because all along I wanted so much to be the artist I really wasn’t: suave and accomplished, the kind I saw in books or museums.” - Katherine Bradford Favorite quotes from the book:
"I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the late time you recalled it." p. xii-xiii "Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional." p. 153 "These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept." p. 283 "I remember Dorothy Allison saying once that if you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you have not gone far enough." p. 289 "Here we may be confronting another of photography's treacheries over and above the medium's power to displace real memories." p. 307 Letter from her father, Robert Munger: "We are perennially reminded that art is prophetic... and that some of our best modern works of art are those in which world- or self- dissolution is represented. So perhaps it is not too much out of line to indulge in the prophesy and hope that there may arise a truly vital germ of creative art which will generate, in the midst of the constant treat of death, a will to endure, and which will: 1) lend strength and vitality to a more meaningful kind of life, and 2) emphasize and strengthen the life conserving processes of civilization." Mann's response: "Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father's lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make, to peer behind some of those ten thousand doors? Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried." p. 398 |
Art of the DayThis blog is to organize art I've seen, books I've read, and advice I've received. Archives
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