Inspiration and Information for People in the Arts: Parts 2 and 3

PART TWO

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SMALL ART AND GREAT ART

• “The great art includes much that the small art excludes: humor, pain, and evil.” (Oscar W. Firkins)
• “Great art is either easy or impossible.” (George Bernard Shaw)
• Indifference to the response of an audience “is a necessary trait of all artists who have something new to say.” (Art critic Roger Fry)
• “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” (Jonathan Swift)
• “Every great and original writer…must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

 

UNDERSTAND THAT IT IS NOT POSSIBE TO DESCRIBE THE COMPLETE, COMPLEX STRUCTURE OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS AN EXPERT ARTIST HAS ACQUIRED;

• “Mastering accumulated knowledge, gathering new facts, observing, exploring, experimenting, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination…The sheer labor of preparing technically for creative work, consciously acquiring the requisite knowledge of a medium and skills in its use, is extensive and enough to repel many from achievement.” (Brewster Ghiselin)
• “Every artist was first an amateur.” (R.W. Emerson)
• “When a painting is finished, it is like a new-born child. The artist himself must have time for understanding it.” (Henri Matisse)

 

THE VALUE IN ALL ARTS OF SUCCINCTNESS, INCLUDING ONLY WHAT IS ESSENTIAL

• “In art economy is always beauty.” (Henry James)
• “The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.” (Ernest Hemingway)
• “A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.” (Henry David Thoreau)

 

ARTISTS ARE BY NATURE INDEPENDENT, RESTLESS, AND CONFIDENT OF THEIR TALENT

• “The artist must do the launching of his own career. He has to prove what he can do for himself.” (Vladimir Horowitz)
• “I have never known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.” (Cicero)
• “How few writers can prostitute their powers. They are always implying, ‘I am capable of higher things”.” (Edward Morgan Forster)
• The process of creativity is “characterized…by restlessness, and creative people often move on to other projects just when the world is beginning to catch on to what they have done.” (Jane Piirto)
• “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” (Abbe Dimnet)
• “Writing is a compulsive and delectable thing.” (Henry Miller)

 

MOST ARTISTS HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

• When a young man approached him and said, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” James Joyce said, “No, it’s done a lot of other things too.” (James Sutherland)

 

HOW ART WORKS: THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST

• “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.” (Alfred North Whitehead)
• “Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.” (Arthur Symons)
• “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.” (R.W. Emerson)
• “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (James Joyce)
• “The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it.” (John Dewey)
• “The chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich complex matter to deal with.” (Walter Pater)
• “A man’s (writer’s) works often describe his longings or temptations and almost never his own true story.” (Albert Camus)

 

PART THREE

ART WHOLLY TAKES OVER THE DEVOTED ARTIST

• “The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.” (W.B. Yeats)
• “What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.” (Marcel Proust)
• “Many excellent writers, very many painters, and most musicians are so tedious on any subject but their own.” (Arthur Symons)
• “I do not believe there lives the Southern writer who can say without lying that writing is any fun to him.” (William Faulkner)
• “When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.” (John Ruskin)

 

OFTEN ARTISTS DON’T THINK HIGHLY OF THEIR CRITICS

• “You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.” (Benjamin Disraeli) But when T.S. Eliot, an editor himself for a time, was asked if he agreed that most editors are failed writers he said, “Perhaps, but so are most writers.” (I.A. Richards)
• “Some critics haven’t had a new idea since they were undergraduates.”(Saul Bellow)
• “I am convinced that the spontaneous judgment of the public is always more authentic than the opinion of those who set themselves up to be judges of works of art.” (Igor Stravinsky)
• “A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate it to the world.” (Joseph Addison)

 

THE ARTIST WORKS HARD, BUT COULD WORK HARDER

• “Genius has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble.” (Samuel Butler)
• “If you wish to be a writer, write.” (Epictetus)
• “Nine out of ten writers, I am sure, could write more. I think they should and, if they did, they would find their work improving even beyond their own, their agent’s, and their editor’s highest hopes.” (John Creasey)

 

ARTISTS ARE SENSITIVE ABOUT EVEN THE SMALLEST THINGS

• “A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” (Oscar Wilde)
• At tea once, novelist Ronald Firbank said to poet Siegfried Sassoon, “I adore italics, don’t you?”

 

ARTISTS ARE INDEBTED TO THE WORK OF OTHER ARTISTS

• “Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available to his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from.” (Ernest Hemingway)
• “Creativity is contagious, pass it on.” (Albert Einstein)

 

AMONG THE INSPIRATION AND INFORMATION FOR PEOPLE IN THE ARTS IS THE UNVERSAL TRUTH THAT CRAFT SHOULD BE SUBTLE AND NEVER DRAW ATTENTION TO ITSELF IN A WORK

• “Art lies in concealing art.” (Ovid)

 

ARTISTS MUST SACRIFICE

• “To follow an art you’ve got to give something up.” (Katherine Anne Porter)
• “Tolerate nothing around you which is not useful to you or which you do not find beautiful.” (John Ruskin)

 

ARTISTIC LICENSE

• “Poets have a license to lie.” (Pliny the Younger)

 

ART BENEFITS FROM PATIENCE:  DON’T BE IN SUCH A HURRY

• “Art done least rapidly, art most cherishes.” (Robert Browning)

 

WRITING IS NO GOOD WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE

• “The reason that so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.” (Walter Bagehot)
• “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.” (Oscar Wilde)
• “All our words from loose using have lost theirs edge.” (Ernest Hemingway)
• “The literary artist is of necessity a scholar.” (Walter Pater)

 

STAY AN ARTIST AS LONG AS YOU LIVE

• “Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” (Pablo Picasso)

© 2017 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click on the following link:

http://www.mentorcoach.com/positive-psychology-coaching/interviews/interview-david-j-rogers/

 

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