You must be Independent, Independent, Independent - don't talk so much but do more - go your own way and let your neighbour go his... Shake off all the props - the props tradition and authority give you - and go alone - crawl - stumble - stagger - but go alone.
Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.
Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
If you are any kind of an artist, then validation … can be a result, but you’re going to do the work anyway. Because you’re just wired that way. It’s so engrained, it’s such a part of your personality that you don’t just stop doing it.
Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: “Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'I inquire, why'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switchYeah make a way to face the music likeLife savings for a mosh pit riotListen to a mixRock the tickets, higher volumeVelocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot
My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
If it's your greatest dream, you wouldn't give up so easily.. So do yourself a favour, find it again & start focusing on anything that will help you materialise it, it's not going to be a walk in the park, but it will help you sleep at night; 10 years from now.
Anyone that says his mind will be probably regarded a fool, but the true artist is not moved by the comments about the looks of his painting or remarks that are dreadfully sarcastic, but hearken now! That he who says what others want to hear hasn't said anything of his own.
Creativity is a gift each one of us is born with, irrespective of our backgrounds and entitlement of culture, The challenge is to hold onto this gift as we go through life. To nurture it. To encourage it. Because every single day we encounter forces that would rather it went away.
When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand.
In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?
The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me.
