One of my favorite art quotes is from Pauline Kael, the American film critic who was known for her witty movie reviews:
“Art doesn’t come in measured quantities: it’s got to be too much or it’s not enough.”
I always think of this quote when I see flowers blooming in the spring. They don’t hold back. It’s all about extravagance, like my roses, which have been over-the-top lately.
May we all remember to be too much today.
In 2001, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Robert Siegel (on NPR’s “All Things Considered”) asked the Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz whether poetry was a dying art. “No,” replied Kunitz, “in fact people are more involved with poetry now than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.” Back in the 1970s, Kunitz wasn’t so optimistic. People…
Ten years ago I sat in on a drawing class in Oakland. The topic that day happened to be shading–how to draw the play of light and shadow around an image. After the demonstration I thanked the instructor, and was barely out the door before I burst into tears. Apparently, I had never paid much…
Last Friday January 23rd, the French painter and art teacher Paul Reynard died in his New York home. He wasn’t particularly well known for his art in the United States (in fact I couldn’t find any images of his paintings on the Internet.) However, I loved something he once said about the creative process: “…there…
I’m learning how to draw. It’s amazing that drawing doesn’t take years of art classes. Betty Edwards, in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, says that we already know how to draw. We just have to get our left brains out of the way so that our right brains (that part of us…
Many years ago, a friend talked me into attending a creative writing workshop. Since I’d never done anything like that before, I had no prior expectations. I was totally unprepared for what happened. We were given some topic to write about, I put my pen to the page and I found myself writing a fantasy-fairy…
Lately, I keep thinking of the Spanish word aprovechar, which means to make good use of something. When I have difficulty with a particular class or project, I can view it as an opportunity to use whatever is there to the best of my ability, not trying to push beyond. I will make good use…