Posts from the ‘For Artists’ Category

Inspirational Quotes on Creativity

Happy Friday! I hope you have a nice long weekend! Creative people need inspiration, and shown below are some inspirational quotes on the topic of creativity! Our daughter is one of the most creative people I know, and I hope she always keeps this quality–it’s a great quality to possess!

“Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.” –Albert Einstein

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” –Pablo Picasso

“You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.” –George Bernard Shaw

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, and expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.” –Henri Matisse

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” –Sylvia Plath

“There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” –Edward De Bono

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” –Maya Angelou

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” –Pablo Picasso

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” –Vincent Van Gogh

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps have never been seen.” –Oprah Winfery

“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” –Dorothy Parker

“Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” –Bruce Garrabrandt

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” –Jack London

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” –Bill Moyers

“The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” –Abe Tannenbaum

“Creativity can solve almost any problem” –George Lois

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” –George Bernard Shaw

“What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” –Deepak Chopra

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.” –Gustave Flaubert

“I dwell in possibility.” –Emily Dickinson

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe in order.” –Virginia Woolf

“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.” –Earnest Hemingway

Photography Quotes

It has been a very hectic week here, and the week flew by, again! Below are some of my favorite photography quotes that I lean on for inspiration. I hope you enjoy them as well!

“Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.” –Sally Mann

“The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don’t know, or already know and should take seriously.” –Emmet Gowin

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” –Henri Cartier-Bresson

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” –Richard Avedon

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.  What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” –Aaron Siskind

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” –Paul Strand

“It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.” –Mary Ellen Mark

“Photographing a cake can be art.” –Irving Penn

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” –Alfred Stieglitz

“Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it may be.”  –Edward Weston

“To me, photography is a major force in explaining man to man.” –Edward Steichen

“Look and think before opening the shutter.  The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” –Yousuf Karsh

“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” –Man Ray

“Which of my photographs is my favorite?  The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” –Imogen Cunningham

“Everything is a subject.  Every subject has a rhythm.  To feel it is the raison detre.  The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.” –Andre Kertesz

“Stare.  It is the way to educate your eye, and more.  Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.  Die knowing something. You are not here long.”  –Walker Evans

“Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas.  It is a creative art.” –Ansel Adams

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” –Diane Arbus

Make Your Own Path

I love these word by Lisa Congdon about making your own path in life, and maybe these words will resonate with you as well!

In the world today, we have so much more direct information about other people’s lives than we’ve ever ever had before. Social media keeps us abreast of everyone’s activities and accomplishments. As a result, we may sometimes feel like our lives aren’t as interesting as other people’s or that our work isn’t as impactful or our bodies aren’t as attractive. What we see on social media can make us feel horrible about ourselves! So, it’s important to use social media judiciously and to stay focused on the health and progress of your own journey without comparison. Create and nurture your own path.

Creativity

“Creativity is for everyone — it’s an innate human trait to build things and to express ourselves through the things we make.” —Suleika Jaouad

I loved Jaouad’s memoir Between Two Kingdoms. It was a wonderful read, and I highly recommend it. I love her ideas on creativity, balance, and rest. Below are a few excerpts from Jaouad on creativity from an interview on creativity, that I enjoyed, and you might too.

Doing things I’ve never done before, sparks joy. Over the last year, I’ve tried my hand at everything from painting watercolors to flower arranging, and I’m always looking for new forms of creative expression to twist my practice out of its usual ruts. Most recently it was a creative conversation with my husband, Jon Batiste. We sat down on the floor of his studio with a couple of microphones and some powerful community-sourced questions about life and creativity. We’d never really worked together in a professional capacity, and it was really fun to make something together, to learn how to edit audio and then to send it off into the world.

I am drawn and love journaling because it doesn’t require any training or expertise, and the barrier to entry is so low. You just need a notebook and a pen. Also, it can take any shape—stories, lists, poems or some kind of hybrid between writing and doodling. If you’re feeling uninspired, prompts can be useful too — The Isolation Journals has an archive of over 200 free creative prompts to get you started.

In the past, I wrapped up a lot of my self-worth in my productivity, which made it a struggle to balance rest and work. When I was diagnosed with cancer at 22, I wrote my column from my hospital room. While it was an amazing opportunity, I often pushed my body to the point of making myself sicker. I realized I had to build a career accommodating my limitations and lingering health challenges. So I chose the freelance route, which gave me as much flexibility as I needed.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the conflation of doing your best with doing the best. I think it’s a product of how hyper-productive and hyper-competitive American culture is — but whatever the case, I’ve been trying to disentangle the two. And I think that doing my best is trying my hardest, but not at the cost of my own well-being or the well-being of others around me. 

In terms of self-forgiveness and when doing your best falls short, I have a type-A personality and a turbo-charged, hyper-productive mentality, so I rarely feel like I’m doing enough. Something I’ve been trying out lately is keeping an accomplishment log of everything I did that day. Not only the work tasks but also the tendernesses — those good things I’ve done for myself and the people I care about. I count the work call and the nap equally. When I make that list, not only do I feel that I’ve done enough, I feel proud of my body and proud of myself.

I’m a big believer in contagion magic, which is the idea that objects are imbued with the people and places they’ve come in contact with. The objects I fall in love with and fill my home with typically hold some kind of special meaning to me. I’m an avid flea market and thrift store hunter of beautiful, unlikely finds, especially those that make you double-take, like a trompe l’oeil. 

We will all have life interruptions, be it illness or heartbreak or some other unexpected plot twist that brings you to the floor. Often we think we need to get through these times as quickly as possible. But the in-between moments, even though they’re difficult, are sacred and transformational. They’re rites of passage and should be honored, not rushed. Ultimately, I hope that my book Between Two Kingdoms feels like a companion through those valleys.

“[As] we get older, we tend to accept this strange idea that if we don’t do something professionally—if we’re not pursuing painting or writing or music seriously—that it’s not for us. I just don’t accept that. Humans are deeply creative beings.” —Suleika Jaouad

Read the full interview here.

Wise Words

We have all been sick, and I was recently talking to a friend about all of the ups and downs of life, that really make a whole life, which reminded me of this wonderful quote, below by Hugh MacKay, which I have always loved:

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don’t mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep” and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself, “Is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

I really love that.

You Are Exactly Where You Need To Be

These words, below, by Lisa Congdon resonated with me, and maybe these words will resonate with you, too! 

This phrase [You Are Exactly Where You Need To Be] can be life-changing when you apply it to difficult situations. When we say to ourselves, “This isn’t working out the way I wanted, and this is exactly where I need to be,” it reminds us that everything that happens on our paths — even the confusing, scary, disappointing stuff — is an essential part of our path, there to teach us something or humble us in some way. It also reminds us that every person’s path is different. Your path is yours. Hers is hers. His is his. Theirs is theirs. What we can control is how much openness we extend to ourselves on our paths, how much we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, fumble, fail, and risk with a sense of humor and affection. May we all do better at allowing the full range of our experiences — even the crappy experiences — to nurture us.

Image courtesy of Oamul Lu.

Where is Art Derived?

This is such an interesting idea, this poem by Ha Jin, shown above. Do you agree that poetry (and all art, music, etc.) stems from grief? For sure, I believe that we can take whatever grief we cannot eliminate, and make it into a creative offering.

But if grief were no more — would we stop creating? Perhaps, in addition to grief, wonder and the numinous are other sources for creative inspiration.

I believe art and nature shows us the essence of why we are alive and (if you are spiritually inclined) the divine.

Glimmers

How lovely is that?

So, recently, I took a walk around the neighborhood with Alex and Victory, and, let me tell you, glimmers abound. Here is a short list:

*Pushing Victory in her Hound About, while seeing her fur glistening in the sun.

*Seeing Alex balancing well on her scooter.

*Alex telling me all about the artwork she plans to make.

*Seeing beautiful flowers blooming.

*Feeling the cool, spring breeze.

*Seeing the sun start to set.

What glimmers have you seen lately?

Why Beauty Matters

Why does beauty matter, despite the really difficult things going on in our world? I love quotes, and I love this quote by C.S. Lewis, below.

“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.” ―C.S. Lewis

As Lewis suggests: life has never been perfect, the precipice has always been near. And yet―these moments of unbearable beauty mean more than anything else that might ever happen to us. In fact, the precipice is the reason why they mean so much. They point us in the direction of the beautiful world, the one we feel so improvably sure is out there somewhere.