art(0/7)
Music is a kind of sustenance
I don’t think of music as entertainment. I think of it as a type of sustenance. And sometimes you need food, and sometimes you need water, and sometimes you need music, and sometimes you need paintings. Guy Raz Interviews Regina Spektor
Four reactions to a shattered bowl
I was playing bridge one evening with a musician, a chemistry teacher, and a painter when, during a particularly tense hand, a large porcelain bowl that we kept on the piano suddenly shattered. After we had all calmed ourselves down, we found four completely individual reactions. Looking at all the tiny scattered pieces, I thought that I had never realized before how final a metaphor a broken bowl could be. The chemistry teacher pointed out that someone had emptied an ashtray into the bowl with a cigarette still burning, and of course the heat had shattered the bowl.…
In sketching I observed it
Oh, I “remember” places I’ve been and things I’ve seen. I could tell you about sitting in a pub on Kings' Road and seeing a table of spike-haired kids starting a little fire in an ash tray with some lighter fluid. I could tell you, and you would be told, and that would be that. But in sketching it I preserved it. I had observed it. I found this was a benefit that rendered the quality of my drawings irrelevant.…
All art is cosmos
All art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos.
In art we are helped to remember
In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace.
We are afraid of this kind of prayer
To serve a work of art is almost identical with adoring the Master of the Universe in contemplative prayer. In contemplative prayer the saint (who knows himself to be a sinner, for none of us is whole, healed and holy twenty-four hours a day) turns inwards in what is called “the prayer of the heart,” not to find self, but to lose self in order to be found. We are afraid of this kind of prayer, we of the twentieth century Judeo-Christian tradition.…
When the artist is truly the servant of the work the work is better than the artist
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist. Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrant’s brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere.…