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.