From my favorite book, The Art Spirit by Robert Henri: …we must get rid of this outside feeling of looking in on art. We must get on the inside and press out. Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit…
When I teach, what I think about is how I’m going to create space for learning and magic, not the content. In the larger scheme of things, rich, fertile space is way more important than any piece of information. So if space is so important, why do we continue to focus on the specifics–the subject,…
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…
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…
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…
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