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QUOTES Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing.
It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the
real meaning of things. The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible. Then, using only one color as a basis, you structure the entire painting around it. Color represents a logic that is just as unrelenting as the logic of form. One must never let go before having managed to set down one's first impressions. The big artist does not sit down monkey-like and copy,...but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. He learns what she does with light, the big tool, and then color, then form, and appropriates them to his own use....But if he ever thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better-shaped boat, he'll capsize. So I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round and round to make a living; and second, the study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a somber background. All the sentiment of a work of art comes unconsciously, or nearly so, from the state of the artistís soul. I am seeking a painting definition of that simple work nature. The stronger the motive back of a line the stronger and therefore the more beautiful, the line will be. The object of painting is not to make a picture, this is a by-product,. The object behind every true work of art is the attainment of a state of being, a more than ordinary moment of existence. These results, however crude, become dear to the artist who made them because they are records of states of being which he has enjoyed and which he would regain. To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. Do not be an art critic, but paint; therein lies salvation. Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul. Do not finish your work too much. Though it were a ruby, fling it far from you. It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own; your sensation, your intelligence, and your soul will triumph over the eye of the amateur. Go from dark to light , light to dark. I have noticed that whatever is finished at one sitting
is fresher, better drawn, and profits from many lucky accidents. I see,
too, how meticulously one must follow nature, and not be satisfied with
a hasty sketch. How often, looking at my drawings, have I been sorry that
I hadn't had the energy to spend half an hour more on them. The first
two things to study are form and values. For me, these are the bases of
what is serious in art. Color and Finnish put charm into one's work. Always
keep in mind the mass, the ensemble which has struck you. Never lose sight
of that first impression by which you were moved. Begin by determining
your composition. Then the values- the relation of the forms to the values.
I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested
in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these
are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework
the picture constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.
Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error;
so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand
and can unite in your own felling. Be firm, be meek, but follow your own
convictions. When one follows another, one is always behind. I am seeing
a certain place. While I strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never
for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me. Reality is
one part of art; feeling completes it. Before any site or any object,
abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched,
you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion. Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself. The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do. Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away. I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living. -Hans Hofmann The question for me is whether or not something moves me and engages me. If I am moved and engaged by something, I find it beautiful. For me the term beautiful is not pejorative, it is always affirmative. If I say I find it very convincing, even though it is ugly, the fact it is done with such authenticity and conviction and it is finally persuasive, it becomes beautiful. In other words, I don't think beauty is simply a question of appearances. It can come out left field and redefine itself. It can be something you've never seen before, or it can be something you think you have seen before, like my work, that presents itself with another life. I can be convinced by a painting by Lucian Freud and very unconvinced by a painting by Eric Fischl, but they are both kind of expressionistic figurative paintings. One has a kind of force behind it, a moral fury, and a resistance I find interesting. The other is just full of acquiescence and complicity. Even though they look superficially similar, they have an entirely different effect on me. I can say the same thing about many abstract painters. Well, a lot of these people learned their lesson from Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol is not an artist whose work I like. In a sense, Andy Warhol was the visual artist equivalent of the method actor who becomes the subject. I do the same thing. My work is based on immersion. I am immersed in a very different set of parameters and aspirations. I am taking on the history of art, I'm immersed in it and I'm immersed in what I make. I am what I make in other words; there is no difference. He was the same way, but he was really a television ad, or a billboard. He had as much depth as a billboard. To talk about him as a profound person is ridiculous. It might be argued, however, that Warhol was profound in his emptiness and he was profoundly attached to something in the culture that drives out all content and all hope. He was profoundly attached to the dehumanization of the culture and embraced it and really became a part of it. He is like a blinking sign that says nothing except I want to be famous. The emptiness of it is stunning. It is that emptiness and the slickness of it that has appealed to so many other artists who followed him. -Sean Scully
"Sigmund Freud once said, 'Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.' When I was fifteen or sixteen I read an article about self-hypnosis, and decided to try it. After a relaxation procedure, I began to repeat the phrase I'd been given, and felt myself sink deeper and deeper into my body. Within several minutes I noticed I was sinking more rapidly--it felt like wind or water rushing by me--and suddenly it was as though I'd fallen out the bottom. I had passed through some barrier and was floating in an immense, dark space, like outer space, with flickering points of light. I was frightened not only in being completely without bearings, but by a roaring which surrounded and seemed to penetrate me. Then I understood: that vast sound was many millions of voices, speaking in hundreds of languages. My body began to shiver with excitement, and the physical motion quickly brought me back to my bedroom on a sunny, Summer afternoon. That experience was a central one for me, because it demonstrated that the true nature of existence was quite different from how it had been conventionally described. For over forty years I've believed there is a transcendence possible by going into the body, just as by reaching into what is vast and grand we come onto what is particular and personal and precious. I see the poem as a descent into the transcendental body of language, a process that is actual, not metaphoric--the poem as a kind of technology for both enacting and extending the ecstatic world. Gregory Bateson saw that the structures and syntax of human language are of the same family as the structure and syntax of the universe. David Abrams has argued elegantly that through language we become co-creators of what exists. As a poet I've tried to enact in my language everything I've experienced, all that my imagination and intuition have described, and have tried to exclude nothing. I believe if we give ourselves fully, poetry can bring us into a magical, alchemical, intercourse with the world. The ancient alchemist Hermes Trismegistus has best described the scale and inclusiveness I have always wanted for my poetry: "Find your home in the haunts of every living creature. Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality: heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together." "It has always been the work of poetry to give humanity new images of the world, and new descriptions of what it means to exist. I take that responsibility seriously. " -from the Introduction to James Bertolino, Greatest Hits, 1965-2000, chapbook published as part of its "Greatest Hits" series by Pudding House Publications, Johnstown, Ohio, 2000. |