art
The basic question here is whether you think life is a wonderful condition, or not. I don’t, particularly. Amazingly enough, it’s not entirely to my liking.
“The Mind’s Eye” by Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, December 11, 2006, 76-85.
The eyes are the gateway to the cartoon character’s soul. Make sure pupil placement is where you need it to be.
“Griffy’s Top 40 List on Comics and Their Creation”
I don’t think there’s any other reason we have art than to save us, the way our liver is there to keep us alive. I have come to regard the arts as external organs. They have always been as critical to me as my kidneys are. It’s like a dialysis machine you draw yourself.
“How Non-Artists Can Draw: Comics Great Lynda Barry on Teaching Creativity,” ARTNews, by Nicole Casamento, June 5, 2014.
Catch things that have been falling for a thousand years.
I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
interview by David Salle, in Interview magazine.
I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 187.
A word can be any size.
Interview with Paul Holdengräber, LIVE from the NYPL, March 6, 2013
Because carvers revere the god of unseen effort, of hidden work, of the back of things. The god of assiduousness, reigning over obsessives and perfectionists. Writers who delete whole chapters in the slender hope that what’s gone will shine through what’s left. Computer scientists who write beautiful code, programs that are more elegant than necessity demands. Why stop there? The cleaner who does more than an employer will ever notice, the night nurse who holds the hand of the unconscious stranger. If you’re looking for glamour, you’ve come to the wrong place, but it’s where you’ll find two old carvers whose serenity seemed to flower out of a lifetime of scrupulous work. Maybe it explains their venerable age, too. Somewhere I read of a study that identified not optimism or happiness or serenity or sociability as the psychological trait most predictive of longevity, but a more homespun one: conscientiousness.
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 111.
In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson—as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 9–10.
To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” in Walden (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1910), 117.
I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.
Originally published in an article in the New York Herald Tribune, quoted in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, by Brady M. Roberts (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 1995), 32.
Limitations are really good for you. They are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to be more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation. It’s black and white, or line or not line, charcoal, pencil, pen. You might have a bit of color—but if you can use only three colors, you’ve got to make them look whatever color you want. What did Picasso say? “If you haven’t got any red, use blue.” Make blue look like red.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 100.