From the Bookshelf

Dear Reader,

Rooting around for this month’s subject, I looked at my bookshelves and found Artist to Artist: Inspiration & Advice from Artists Past & Present complied by Clint Brown. It’s a lightly illustrated paperback with woodcuts, lithographs, engravings – black and white artworks that delight, while keeping down the publishing costs. Brown organized the quotations by categories (Fear and Doubt, Sketching, Politics). These nibbles of wisdom are fun and/or thought-provoking. Here are ten that connected:

1. “Real painters understand with a brush in their hand…What does anyone do with rules? Nothing worthwhile. What’s needed is new, personal sensations; and where to learn those.” Berthe Morisot 1841-1895.

2. “You know it’s very hard to maintain a theory in the face of life that comes crashing about you.” Alice Neel 1900-1984.

3. “For me, making art always has something of play about it. I do hundreds of different things-sketchbooks, drawings on birchbark, drawings on leaves, even on mushrooms.” Mary Frank 1933-

4. “I carry my landscape around with me.” Joan Mitchell 1926-1992.

5. “I met Elizabeth Murray…She worked constantly, wouldn’t go to meals, lived on Grape Nuts. She was a real artist to me.” Jennifer Bartlett 1941-

6. “Very few people know how to work. Inspiration, everybody has inspiration, that’s just hot air.” Beatrice Wood 1895-1998.

7. “Art is not the fashion industry where you market something new each year. I work very slowly, by myself…and I don’t analyze my artistic impulse. If you analyze, you eliminate mystery.” Marisol 1930-2016.

8. “In the studio all distinctions disappear. One has neither name nor family; one is no longer the daughter of one’s mother, one is oneself and individual, and one has before one art, and nothing else. One feels so happy, so free, so proud!” Marie Bashkirtseff 1860-1884.

9. “I think it takes a long time to work a painting…The more paint you put on, the more alive the surface looks, the more you’re defining what you want. It’s like, why don’t you just do one draft of a short story? Because the content isn’t clear, and the content really is the painting.” Jennifer Bartlett 1941-

10. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way-things that I had no words for.” Georgia O’Keefe 1887-1986.

All right, one more because it touched me deeply. “While I drew and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” Kathe Kollwitz 1867-1945.