I can't sleep…
Thirty years ago, I was remembering, an eminent writer had given me some unsolicited advice.
Just look at an orange, she said.
Go on looking at it. For hours.
Then put down what you see.
– C. P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers: Last Things
Photo: anka zhuravleva
As a boy, Picasso liked to draw by candlelight.
He had already intuited that the moving shadows cast by the light would instill a feeling of sway in his work.
~ Colum McCann, Apeirogon: A Novel (Random House, February 25, 2020)
Photo: John Taylor
A superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.
~ Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying (The New Yorker, December 16, 2019)
Notes:
He thinks the prices paid for his works sometimes border on madness. “I want to ignore it, mostly,” he says. “I’ve had sufficient money to do what I liked every day for the last 60 years. Even when I didn’t have much money, I’ve always managed. All I’m interested in is working, really. I’m going to go on working. Artists don’t retire.”
~ Lesley M.M. Blume, The World According to David Hockney (wsj.com, Sept 9, 2019)
Other notables from this essay:
“I have the vanity of an artist. I want my work to be seen. But I don’t have to be seen.” —David Hockney
“[The drawings] seem to exist fully formed. It’s like he bleeds them onto the page.” —Arne Glimcher
Painting above by David Hockney: The Road to York through Sledmere, 1997 – oil on canvas 48×60 in.
Sculptures by Jose Cobo that were part of an installation titled “Incarnation.”
I read the background notes prepared by the artist here. Still don’t get it.
Mystified, mesmerized and looking for a helping hand to explain…
Notes: