Tag: artists inspiration
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Theft or Flattery???
“A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa but people still line up to see the original.” Louis Armstrong (from The Painter’s Keys) Help me out here! When is it okay to appropriate someone else’s work to use for your work? Is it ever okay? Suppose you like to paint in the studio from photographs. Would you…
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Beautifully Purposeful
“Create we must, and respond to this dark hour.” Makoto Fujimura The artistic process for many can be a compulsion, striving to express an idea, a thought, a feeling bubbling up from deep inside. The expression is often not consciously mulled over before erupting into reality. How much time is spent reflecting on the purpose…
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Eyes of the Heart
“I shut my eyes in order to see.” Paul Gauguin (from Skinnyartist.com) How can one create with eyes shut? Gauguin’s statement would seem to not make any sense. Does he mean painting with a blindfold on? Many paintings out there look as though they have been painted with a blindfold on. Many more look…
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Soaking up Enchantment
“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of Cross Creek and The Yearling Do we, as artists, require a place of enchantment? Can we create without a place of enchantment? Do we have to physically be at that place or…
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Dramatically Simple
“When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.” Andrew Wyeth (from The Painter’s Keys) Many of the greatest artists, writers, poets, and creative people in general comment on the importance of keeping it simple. For some artists, this can be a difficult task, especially for those drawn to the dramatic. Although, at times, complicated…
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Shedding the Cocoon
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” Richard Bach (from The Painter’s Keys) Change happens to everybody sooner or later, some planned, some unplanned. Planned changes in art take care and timing. It sounds easy but isn’t always. People get used to a certain style from an artist…
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Hatching Art Eggs
“Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” Ralph Ellison (from The Painter’s Keys) It’s easy to think art just happens. An artist sits down at the easel and paint flows into something beautiful or meaningful or whatever. This hand, holding a brush, flows across the canvas and a painting appears. Presto! Maybe…
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The Whispering Heart
“The man who follows a crowd will never be followed by a crowd.” R.S. Donnell (from The Painter’s Keys) The world is full of quotes about different drummers and roads less traveled, not following the crowd and so on. Who are these different drummers, these solitary travelers? They are the ones who get things done,…
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The Non-fiction Artist
“All has not been said and never will be.” Samuel Beckett (from The Painter’s Keys) Does originality and imagination require an artwork be cut from a whole new cloth or is it simply to look from a fresh angle? The push to constantly startle the viewer has led art further and further out on a…
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Imitating Imagination
“Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.” Miles Davis (from The Painter’s Keys) Definitions and claimants to the dominion of imagination abound. Everybody wants to claim imagination. Has the word lost its meaning? Who really understands what imagination is all about? Everywhere you turn someone or something is called “Imagination” from cruise ships…