My friend Beth Kaplan is a writer who lives in Toronto. We often discuss the creative process and our craft of writing together. She sent me the notes below. Vist her blog.
To live intensely is one of the basic human desires and an artistic necessity.
Sol LeWitt had encouraged that attitude [of ardour and commitment in the artist Eva Hesse] in one of the great freewheeling examples of an inspirational letter from one artist to another. “Learn to say ‘Fuck You’ to the world once in a while,” LeWitt told Hesse. “You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.
“Don’t worry about cool. Make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world.”
“Novelty in creative endeavours usually arises from routine- you have to be familiar with something before you know what is novel … “Having a routine, knowing what to do, is crucial because I’m naturally lazy. A routine is what keeps me from going crazy. It’s calming. My working methods are almost Zenlike, like raking gravel in a monastery.” [artist Chuck Close]
“[Philip Pearlstein] is a role model for me, not in that my art is anything like his but in terms of discipline and day-to-dayness and commitment to work even when it isn’t going well. The set up of the still life and model in his studio becomes much more than just a boring routine. I know Philip is interested in Zen monks and in that whole Zen tradition of calligraphy. Monks spend all those hours meditating. They have their routines, because they think that within routine, and only within routine, enlightenment comes.”
Most artists, like most people, have one good idea or maybe two in life, and that sustains them. In the best circumstances, that’s enough for a career.
Pearlstein: “I paint nudes. I’ve done my best to make paintings that would sell; it’s just not worked out that way.” (This is not quite true.) “I expect this one won’t sell either. There isn’t much of a market for chest hair. But this is what I do. I’m a painter. I wake up every morning and get to work. It’s my little contribution to civilisation.”
[A pilgrimage to see art] can get us back to the root of art as an expression of what’s exceptional in life.
Artist James Turrell: “I want to address the light that we see in dreams… I always tell people that my grandmother, who was a Quaker, said to me, ‘Go inside and greet the light.’ Whether that caused me to make art out of light, or whether it affected how I think about light, I can’t say. If you think of all the cathedrals and sacred places, there aren’t many that don’t involve light as a spiritual element. We also have a physical relationship to light – we drink it as vitamin D. Our health has to do with light. Light is sensual. Anything sensual, while it can attract you toward the spiritual, can hold you from it, too; it can keep you in the physical world, and that’s an explicit part of my work, which I think is sensual and emotional in the way that music is sensual and emotional.”
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