Wise words

 

Thoughts on Art from creative people born on March 14:

from British writer Algernon Blackwood (The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, Incredible Adventures, The Doll and One Other) (1869-1951):

I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns.

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

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from German-born American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955):

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

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from American Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb (Vigil, Labyrinth 1, Frozen Sounds Number 1, Unstill Life III, Blues, Burst) (1903-1974):

I use color in terms of emotional quality, as a vehicle for feeling... feeling is everything I have experienced or thought.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

But to me everything is nature, including any feelings that I have—or dreams. Everything is part of nature. Even painting has become part of nature. To clarify further: I don’t have an ideological approach or a doctrinaire approach to my work. I just paint from my personal feelings, and my reflexes and instincts. I have to trust these.

My favorite symbols were those which I didn't understand.

I want to express the utmost intensity of the color, bring out the quality, make it expressive.

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.

The role of the artist has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.

To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.

Right now I am sick of the idea of all the pretty good pictures and want a picture that is either damn good or no good.

(with Mark Rothko):

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

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from French sociologist, historian, and political commentator Raymond Aron (L’Opium des intellectuels, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Démocratie et totalitarisme, Les Étapes de la pensée sociologique) (1905-1983):

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-, Oscar-, and Emmy-winning playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (The Young Man from Atlanta, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, William Faulkner’s Old Man); also noted for The Trip to Bountiful, The Orphan’s Home Cycle (1916-2009):

I know that people think I have a certain style, but I think style is like the color of the eyes. I don't know that you choose that.

I think there's certain things you don't choose. I don't think that you can choose a style; I think a style chooses you. I think that's almost an unconscious choice. And I don't know that you can choose subject matter, really. I think that's almost an unconscious choice. I have a theory that from the time you're 12 years old all your themes are kind of locked in.

A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid.

I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.

If I ever teach writing again, I’d say the first lesson is to listen.

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from American photographer Diane Arbus (Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Sunday Times Magazine, Untitled, Artforum); noted for photographs of marginalized people (1923-1971):

If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

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from English novelist, poet, and playwright John Wain CBE (Hurry On Down, Strike the Father Dead, Nuncle and Other Stories, Young Shoulders) (1925-1994):

I have nothing to say. And I am saying it. That's poetry.