Hesse, Herman

James, Geoffrey

Part of the cruelty in George Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism – “Those who can do, and those who can’t teach.” – is that it fails to distinguish between those without the gift to do something else and those without the money.

Artists sometimes claim that they work without though of an audience – that they make pictures just for themselves.  We are not deceived.  The only reward worth that much effort is a response, and if no one pays attention, or if the artist cannot live on hope, then he or she is lost.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share – animation.  They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Butzi, Paul

Life is short, the art is long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. (Hippocrates)

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

Painter: Learn to draw and paint like an old master. Everyone will respect you and then you can do whatever you want.

To muse, to dream, to conceive beautiful works is delightful.  But then comes the creation, the production, the upbringing of the child.   To tame the mad chaos of life and let it rise again through one’s work to new life that will speak to all human beings, that is the work of the artist.  His hands have to act as the indefatigable servants of his fantasy.  The artist must work in a tight space like the miner in the rubble of his shaft.  He has to fight down all his difficulties, on after another, just as the enamored knight of the fairy tale has to fight the sorcerer in his constantly changing disguises, until he wins the princess.

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark.  If, however, you want to look at the stars then you will find that darkness is necessary.  But the stars neither demand nor require it of you.

Si tu fais des images, ne parle pas, n'écris pas ne t'analyse pas, ne réponds à aucune question.

If you say your stuff is art, it is.

If you say your stuff is any good, nobody cares about your opinion.

If you want to be rich, photograph celebrities, preferably in embarrassing poses.

If you want to be famous, be insightful, innovative and dead for twenty years.

If free speech is abused by shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, it is belittled by shouting “shit” at a formal dinner.

... grant photography which everybody shows but almost nobody loves.

The camera’s sensational sleight-of-hand took everybody in, even photographers.  The capability of lenses and film to accurately record the subtlest modulations of light, and to capture and preserve whatever the camera was aimed at, implied that here at last was a foolproof way to see things as they really are …  Photography is extract, not abstract by nature, and its content has an explicitness that is awesome and almost undeniable.  There are photographs by the ton that honestly attempt to tell nothing but the truth, but not one photograph that tells the whole true.  By the nature of its mechanism, the camera is an editing device.  However much it takes into its frame and its sliver of time, it leaves out more.  Photography cannot be more than truth as the photographer perceives it or arranges it to be perceived by others…

What counts in the end is just what counts in other forms of artistic expression – integrity, understanding, clarity, the ability of the artist to fulfill the potential of the medium.  Throw in a few imponderables like mystery and magic.  A picture is not a window on the world, but the light-written hieroglyph of one photographer’s peculiar sensibilities.

Don’t tell me what I’m doing.  I don’t want to know!

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

You want me to say it worse?

Fuller, Buckminster

Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work.

Guunzel@aol.com

I loved David Vestal's thoughts on fine art where he wondered if there should also be medium and coarse art. "Why do we grade art like sandpaper?"  We say, "it is/was a fine day" which means it was an ok day, neither great nor bad. "Did you enjoy your meal at the restaurant?" "It was fine" meaning it met expectations but didn't go beyond that. So why is the word "fine" used to describe the highest form of print?

Hesse, Herman

I can give you nothing that is not already within you.

I can throw open to you no picture galleries that are not your own.

I can help you to make your own world visible.

That is all.

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. (460-400 B.C.)

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,---but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Ikemoto, Howard

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people to draw.  She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

Painting is a synthetic process.  The artist begins with a blank canvas and a set of conventions and approaches developed over several centuries; his finished work is a record of its own creation and bears the artist’ handwork, his autographic stamp.  In photography the question of a personal style is much more elusive.  The photographer does not begin by contemplating an empty space; his viewfinder is filled, whichever way he points it.  His central problem is one of selection – first the intellectual or perceptual problem of what to photograph, then the more formal problem of how to photograph…  compared with the painter, the photographer has relatively little control over the surface of his image, and throughout the process must come to terms with the recalcitrantly machine-like nature of photography, not the least drawback of which is its insensitivity to how the photographer felt at the moment of exposure.

The excellence of every art is its intensity.

If something deep within even the most tentative and minor of artists didn’t think his work was good, he would stop – forever.

He was taking a shower in his apartment before breakfast.  Suddenly his body turned as light as a feather.  His head lifted up off his shoulders, and he felt like the time he had planed in a sailboat.  The boat had been traveling at normal speed, but the wind was extremely high.  Without warning the hull lifted out of the water and the drag dropped instantly to near zero and the boat began flying, as if some giant hand had grabbed hold of the mast and flung the boat over the surface like a skimming stone.  .... Within two ours he had reworked his problem in complete quantitative detail.  Shaking, he graphed the solution and it matched the arc in his mind.  The equations, which over the last months had become tired and suspicious, came to life, and they were right and they were graceful and they glistened like the moon over the trees. (in the novel 'Good Benito')

An old professor once described the discomfort when charging for photographs "You'll get over it. It's like a case of gas."

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

There’s a myth among amateurs, optimists and fools that beyond a certain level of achievement, famous artists retire to some kind of Elysium where criticism no longer wounds and work materializes without their effort.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Composition is making the picture work.  There are lots of books with lots of rules and formulas about composition.  Did you ever see a great photograph or painting made by these formulas?  I haven’t.  After you say ‘It works.’ then you can talk about details.

We don’t take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our minds, with our hearts, and with our bellies sometimes.

Photography is 1% inspiration and 99% moving furniture.

Why shouldn’t a photographer have an editorial voice?

Come with a preconceived idea – but an open mind.

Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you.

In art the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous.  I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me.  By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly.  And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches.  And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich.  But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term.  Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters.  I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries.  Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.

With photographs you can cut a hole into a wall.  What you get is a window.  If you look through this window you can spy on memories, on stories, on ideas – in any case you will forever see something different.

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t squeak.

Did I do any better with the promises of youth?  But the question was absurd.  Like my friends, I did the best I could – discovering along the way that the person who makes a vow is not the same person who must keep it.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

‘It’s a very different thing though, photography?’

‘Yes it is.  But it makes one interested in the question of likeness.  I sometimes think it’s easier to get a likeness in paint.’

‘That’s very intriguing.  The common opinion would be the other way about.’

‘For how many minutes, Lady Peter, would you say you had looked at me this morning?  Looked directly, I mean.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet.  ‘For some third of the time we have been together?  Perhaps less.’

‘Probably less.  There’s a taboo of kinds against people staring at each other.  Say five minutes; I am certain it has been less, and it cannot have been more.’

‘And a portrait painter has a license to stare, you mean?’

‘Indeed, yes.  The painter stares for hours together.  The camera, on the other hand, is done in a split second.  People can appear for a split second in ways that are unrecognisably strange to them and their friends.’

‘So your cunning is to catch the typical moment?’

‘One of them.  My cunning is required to guess which of the million ways a person looks, considered second by second, is the way they would like to look, and capture that.’

‘And there wouldn’t always be an answer to the problem, would there?  Since a lot of people don’t like any of the ways they look.  They don’t like their own appearance at all.’

‘You are precisely right.  For one thing, they have never seen it.  Everybody poses themselves when they look in a mirror; they don’t see what others see.  You yourself would be a good example of that.’

‘Why me particularly?’

‘Because your features are rather plain when at rest; it is animation that gives them beauty.  .... A painting takes time.  It therefore contains time.  The changing expressions of the subject, the changing light, the trust or mistrust with which the subject regards the painter are all in play.’

‘And the result will show somebody not as they actually appeared for any one of the million split seconds that could have been photographed, but as they appeared for an hour, or a week, or a year.’

He was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction.  I envied him for this and tried in vain to emulate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes.

Where do these spots keep coming from?

The greater the striving for the sublime, the more ridiculous these got-up pieces appear when finished.

And whether good or bad, luck is the attentive photographer’s teacher, for it defines what might be anticipated next time.

We will either make horrible art or we will make horrible history.  We do not have the option of not confronting the darker side of our nature.

It is self-defeating to attempt to make life decisions based solely on analytical reasons.

I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.  If artists embrace this view of themselves, they necessarily have to attend to its perpetuation.  They have to live it out.  Their time and energy are consumed for social purposes.  Artists then make decisions in terms of a role defined by others, falling into their power and serving to illustrate their theories.  The Renaissance focused this social attention on the artist’s individuality, and the focus persists today in a curious form that n the one hand inflates artists’ egoistic concept of themselves and on the other places them at the mercy of the social forces on which they become defendant.  Artists can suffer terribly in this dilemma.  It is taxing to think out and then maintain a view of one’s self that is realistic.  The pressure to earn a living confronts a fickle public taste.  Artists have to please whim to live on their art.  They stand in fearful danger of looking to this taste to define their working decisions.  Sometime during the course of their development, they have to forge a character subtle enough to nourish and protect, and foster the growth of the part of themselves that makes art, and at the same time practical enough to deal with the world pragmatically.  They have to maintain a position between care of themselves and care of their work in the world, just as they have to sustain the delicate tension between intuition and sensory information.

This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that artists are, in this sense, special because they are intrinsically involved in a difficult balance not so blatantly precarious in other professions.  They lawyer and the doctor practice their callings.  The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do.  They do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.

The tendency to complete a Gestalt is so strong that it is surprising so many people have trouble finishing tasks.  It just shows the inherent difficulty of getting anything physical accomplished.  Matter is stubborn.  Only dogged effort brings a concept into an arena in which it can demand the serious attention we give a challenge to our own physical selves.  It is here that ‘conceptual art’ tends to be, using Alexandra’s [her daughter] adjective, ‘lame’.  The concept, remaining merely conceptual, falls short of the bite of physical presence.  Just one step away is the debilitating idea that a concept is as forceful in its conception as in its realization.

I see that this might be considered an intelligent move.  The world is cluttered with objects anyway.  The ideas in my head are invariably more radiant than what is under my hand.  But something puritanical and tough in me won’t take that fence.  The poem has to be written, the painting painted, the sculpture wrought.  The beds have to be made, the food cooked, the dishes done the clothes washed and ironed.  Life just seems to me irremediably about coping with the physical.

Assael does not consider the history of representational painting as a millstone but rather as a touchstone for new achievements.

In the 150 years since the invention of photography, one fact has been consistently forgotten.  The only sensitive element in the entire image-making process is the photographer.

One never knows, do one?

He doesn’t have to try to be different.  He is different.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art.  When artists get together for dinner they discuss money.

Let’s go back to that gasoline picture [a photograph by Robert Frank of some gasoline pumps].  Let’s say [it’s] the photographer’s understanding of possibilities ... When he took that photograph he couldn’t possibly know – he just could not know – that it would work, that it would be a photograph.  He knew he probably had a chance.  In other words, he cannot know what that’s going to look like as a photograph ... That’s really what photography – still photography – is about.  In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.