Wise Words

Thoughts on Art from creative people born December 13:

from Canadian painter and writer Emily Carr (The Indian Church, Big Raven, Klee Wyck) (1871-1945)

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

...real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint—essence.

I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.

There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

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from American experimental poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen (Before the Brave, Journal of Albion Moonlight, Collected Poems) (1911-1972):

Art is not to throw light but to be light.

I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend—give an extra dimension to—the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush—but I think of both as writing.

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.

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from American writer Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer novels) (1915-1983):

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

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from Canadian Tony-, Oscar-, and Emmy-winning actor Christopher Plummer (Cyrano, Barrymore, Beginners, Arthur Halley’s The Moneychangers, The New Adventures of Madeline) (1919-2021):

Try and stay sober. Until the curtain call. And for God's sake, have fun. Don't suffer for your art. Just have fun.

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from American Tony-, Grammy-, and Emmy-winning actor-singer Dick Van Dyke (Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Van Dyke and Company) (born 1925):

You need someone to love, and something to do that you enjoy, and something to hope for, and that's enough for me.

Somebody asked what I wanted on my gravestone. I'm just going to put: 'Glad I Could Help.'