Sleepdriving
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
-Chuck Close (via sandyhong & @emilycarroll
)
(via nettierharris)
“Where thou art, that is home”, Melanie Laurent by Roe Ethridge for i-D Spring 2010
(via watercolorsintherain)
“Leave us alone, without books, and we’d instantly trip up, get lost – we don’t know where to place our allegiance, what to hang on to; what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings- human beings with our own real flesh and blood; we’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace and strive to be some kind of imaginary general type.”
Notes from the Underground (1864)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
If These Walls Could Talk: Margaret Kilgallen
Like a griot recalling the tales of our ancestors, Margaret Kilgallen’s paintings share with us stories of our past. “The fact that maybe, maybe, somebody will learn from what I’m doing” is what motivated Kilgallen according to a PBS interview. Her main motifs, wood type and confident female figures, helped bring a modern take on bygone days when hobos rode the rails and artisans relied on a steady hand rather than computer.
Her Nouveau Americana art was inspired by hand painted signs she found in the Mission district of San Francisco (possibly even some works done by New Bohemia’s Steve Karbo), along with graffiti found on boxcars, typography from rare books, and folk art. Though she has passed, her influence will live on through her work and from documentaries like Beautiful Losers and the PBS series Art 21.
bob wiley
Camera Obscure with Abelardo Morell: He covered all his windows with black plastic in order to achieve total darkness, he then cut a small hole in the same black plastic material, an image of the outside scenery was reflected directly on the opposite wall, but it was upside-down.
(via portraitofamind)
“If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred million of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Every step in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
