The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk…winding down to the center of my everything.
— Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf, June 7, 2022)
Notes:
I close my eyes. (They) both laugh when I do this. They think you gotta see to paint, but sight is just a distraction from what it really takes to translate image to art. I let it float out my fingers, escape out my breath, and I don’t need to see when my body is an entire vision.
Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf, June 7, 2022)
Notes:
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:
I still wasn’t sure exactly what form the painting would take. But I did know how I should begin. Those first steps—which brush to use, what color, the direction of the first stroke—had come to me out of nowhere: they had gained a foothold in my mind and, bit by bit, taken on a tangible reality of their own. I loved this process.
~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel. (Knopf, October 9, 2018)
Photo: cnd.ha (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
My friend Denise tells me somebody told her, “Shopping is despair,” but my daughter Jennifer says, “Shopping is hope.” Hope gets out of hand. One turquoise ring from eBay is not enough. I must have five. A single secondhand Coach bag is not satisfying – I bid on seven. As I have implied, one is not a concept I understand. When I smoked I smoked three packs a day, when I drank, well, let’s not get into that. If your psyche is a balloon animal and you squeeze to eliminate the cigarettes and whiskey, the crazy has to go somewhere. A friend’s mother ate nothing but clams for six months. Morning, noon, and night, nothing but clams for six months. “I don’t know what it is – I can’t seem to get enough of them,” she told her son. He shakes his head, but i understand. I eat nothing but broccoli for a month, then yogurt for six days, then (for one glorious week) lamb chops. One day I roasted a chicken and had seven chicken sandwiches before nightfall. If I like something, I like it a lot. Just one doesn’t cut it. I don’t know what it is I can’t get enough of. At least I don’t have shopping bags full of duck sauce.
~ Abigail Thomas, Thinking About Memoir
Photo Source: weheartit
“If you follow the paintbrush with your eyes while not moving your head, it forces you to use emdr which is a therapeutic technique to calm anxiety/panic. Watching fish swim causes the same effect.”
Source: Disintegrated Insanity
And so I ask Helen my favorite question: “If you could have one sense back, which would it be?” Her fingers go round and round in circles, and I can feel the girl actually thinking in my palm.
“Which do you pick?” she asks.
Though I have been deprived of all senses save touch since the age of two, while she is only deaf and blind, for me the choice is simple. “Sight,” I tell her, all the glorious colors God has painted on lands and faces. Green is the color I remember with the most pleasure: green from the grass outside our house in New Hampshire. Blue still spills from that square of sky visible over the bed where I lay ill for almost a year, and Mama says my eyes were bright blue before they shrunk behind my lids. Red I have a strong and disagreeable sense of, from when they bled me with leeches. And black, black I know the longest and best because it is my constant companion. These are the only colors I can recall or imagine with any clarity.
~ Kimberly Elkins, What Is Visible, A Novel
This is an excerpt is from a novel about Laura Bridgman (1829-1889). Laura Bridgman’s family was struck with scarlet fever when Laura was two years old. The illness killed her two older sisters and left her deaf, blind, and without a sense of smell or taste. She is known as the first deaf-blind American to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller.
Photography: Media.photobucket via Your Eyes Blaze Out
Credits:
Ayse Juaneda found my blog yesterday (how Ayse?) and I followed her back after browsing her wonderful posts. What amazing talent…
Ayse is from France. She’s an artist, teacher and designer. Her first illustration is a soft pastel on paper – it is titled “Sleeping Birds.” The second is watercolor on paper and is titled “Venice.”
Her work reminds me of a quote by Vincent van Gogh:
“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
You can find Ayse’s blog at aysejuaneda.wordpress.com. Be sure to check it out.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was a Dutch Painter. Titles for works above: Amaryllis (1910), Compositie (1916), Composition No. 9 (Blue Façade) (1913-14).
“If you’ve ever seen a painting, or watched a movie, or read a novel, or enjoyed a performance, or followed a television show that moved you on some essential level, you probably wondered: What inspired that? We’ve wondered that, too. So we asked. What follows are the answers, in all their varied glory, to that question. In part it’s an investigation into the enigmatic nature of creative inspiration. (Which, it turns out, is often not so enigmatic. Step 1: Work. Step 2: Be frustrated. Step 3: Repeat.)”
Read how inspiration fires for Alicia Keys, Anthony Bourdain, Michael Chabon, Quentin Tarantino, Al Pacino, Junot Diaz and others in The New York Times Magazine: Inspiration Issue, September 30, 2012
“At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by our parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by that time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means, Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.”
Sources: Image – 1000drawings via society6.com. Quote: gene-how
“Eyvind Earle (1916 – 2000) was an American artist, author and illustrator. He was noted for his contribution to the background illustration and styling of Disney animated files in the 1950s.” See link below for more magic and big color…
Source: Eyvind Earlie @ Wikipaintings.org – “Big Sur” (1991). “Valley” (1974). “Autumn Sunset” (1987)
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“Winter convinced me I was impermeable.
Today I’ve moved a lawn chair
close enough to prop my legs on the fence
and doze, light pressed like thumbs
against my eyelids. I’d drink this sun
with my veins if I were green and growing,
with chloroplasts instead of follicles.
When I blink away phantom spots, I see a wasp
clinging to the fence board. It strokes
the pine grain with its front legs, back legs
braced as the head bobs, mandibles
harvesting whatever flushes from vesicles
of rotted wood—whatever it is, I can’t see.
The wasp pauses, then flies to my leg
and fondles the stubble there. I will myself
to breath calmly, relaxed, focused
on observing this infinitely interesting
living thing. Then I give way to instinct,
My gasp wrenched to wide-open shout
at the inevitable sting. Once there was
a ceramicist who cast vessels on the scale
of human beings. Asked why he punctured each
one by striking the soft clay with a two-by-four,
he answered, “To let the darkness out.”
~ Laura-Gray Street, Phosphenes and Entopics
Quote Source: atomiclanterns. Image Source: olganoes.com via mydivine–cloudnumber9
Rob Firchau’s blog @ The Hammock Papers, is a frequent stop. His recent post highlights one of James Young’s sketches which catapulted me back to my youth – farming, fields, barns, trees, birds, streams and tranquility. I find his art to be simple (in the finest sense of this word), serene and soothing. James is an artist from Alexandria, Ohio. You can find his portfolio at this link. And his WordPress blog can be found at jamesyoungartist.com.
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Source: Society6.com
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