Wise words

Thoughts on Art from creative people born March 21:

from German Romantic author Jean Paul (Die unsichtbare Loge, Hesperus, Siebenkäs, Titan, Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise) (1763-1825):

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.

Never write on a subject without first having read yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself hungry on it.

A scholar knows no boredom.

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from German-born American Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (Effervescence, The Gate, Auxerre) (1880-1966):

Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul.

Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.

Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.

My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

People say “Hofmann has different styles.” I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.

Through a painting, we can see the whole world.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Phyllis McGinley (Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades); also noted for children’s books such as All Around the Town (1905-1978):

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

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from Australian author Frank Hardy (Power Without Glory, The Yarns of Billy Borker, The Unlucky Australians) (1917-1994):

The truth is impossible to comprehend even when one is willing to tell it. For the truth resides in memory and memory is clouded with repression and a desire to embellish. The recollections of any individual are conditioned by the general truths to which he or she has tried to live. To recall an event is to interpret it, so the truth is altered by the very act of remembering. Therefore the truth, like God, does not exist—only the search for it.

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from English Tony- and Emmy-winning director Peter Brook (Marat/Sade, A Midsummer Night's Dream, La tragédie de Carmen, The Mahabharata) (b. 1925):

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

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from New Zealand children's and YA author Margaret Mahy (A Lion in the Meadow, The Haunting, The Changeover, The Tricksters, Memory, Under-runners, A Summery Saturday Morning, A Villain's Night Out, 24 Hours) (1936-2012):

When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.

Reading is very creative—it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and “live” with the characters.

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

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from Singaporean author Catherine Lim (Little Ironies: Short Stories of Singapore, Or Else, The Lightning God and Other Stories, The Serpent's Tooth, The Bondmaid) (b. 1942):

I draw my inspiration and material from life around me; from people I’ve known.

I write because I enjoy it. I write about things that interest me—human behaviour, human relationships, the not-so-pleasant abilities people possess to deceive one another, seek revenge, inflict pain. And their capacity to bear it all as well.

I’m so sensitive to irony that if I see a situation, I witness something, I hear something, I read a report in the newspaper about something, and I see it as potential for a short story, my ironic sense immediately creates a narrative and then I sit down and write.