G. Steve Journal

Get To Work...

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

...Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

                                                                                                                                                   — Chuck Close

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Getting Lost

Reflecting on our school years with a colleague, we wished we had been less afraid of "failure" and better able to recognize it's value in the larger context of life.  This is especially true in creative fields where the idea of one right answer has little relevance. 

Here's an excerpt from a Seth Godin blog post that nicely sums up our conclusions:

Don't curse the dead ends and the failures. They're the key element of the work you're doing.
We find our way by getting lost. Anything other than that is called reading a map.

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Some Scarce See...

 

Enjoyed this provocative observation by author and artist William Blake:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way... [S]ome scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.

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I Need To...

 

I came across this telling observation by artist Frida Kahlo on one of our ongoing themes, honoring the creative impulse and the importance of keeping it distinct from one's intellect:

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to,

and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

 

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