TImely postings on art for me

Thanks to whiskey river for these timely (for me) quotes on art. I’ll be off to the Learning and Product Art Expo this week to play with art stuff in Pasadena. I haven’t done any art really for some time now, since the boys and the dogs are always around and I really have no space for making art. So it feels a bit weird to be starting up again, but it will make a nice break in my routine. And I’ll probably come home with a ton of additional art supplies that I won’t use in addition to the ton I already have that I don’t use!

whiskey river

“What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.” – John Berger

“What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”
– Elizabeth Bishop

“It is conceivable that the artist might once again be completely integrated in society as he was in the Middle Ages. Today he is hardly likely to find himself unless he is a non-conformist and a rebel. To say this is neither dangerous nor new. It is what society really expects of its artists. For today the artist has, whether he likes it or not, inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist, and bonze. How could such a man be free? How can he really “find himself” if he plays a role that society has predetermined for him? The freedom of the artist is to be sought precisely in the choice of his work and not in the choice of the role as “artist” which society asks him to play.” – Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

“We are all creative artists of life, our physical bodies being the artist’s material (canvas/clay), with our nerves, thoughts, feelings and senses (i.e. the personality components) comprising both the material on which, and the instruments with which, the person molds his creative genius into conduct, behaviour, forms of action and life itself, with his life reflecting every image he creates out of the in-exhaustive source of the unconscious, with every deed expressing originality, creativity and the artist’s living personality. The artist of life is that man who is master of himself wherever he may be found, behaving truly to himself.”
– Daisetz Suzuki