studio index: looking

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Bridget Riley says to E.H. Gombrich....

"My work has grown out of my own experiences of looking, and also out of the work I have seen in the museums and in galleries, so I have seen other artists seeing, and that has been an enormous help to me and a kind of pattern maker, in that it has shown me how a formal structure of looking is shaped and can shape in turn the way that one proceeds with one's own work."

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Light

I am usually at my studio on Friday afternoons, but yesterday's half day of school for Alexander found us all at home--uncharacteristically. The day was warm and brilliant, doubly so due to the spate of frigid temperatures we've been enduring as of late. (Our Pennsylvania skins are getting thin, oh so thin.)

I found myself buoyed by the tapestry of light shifting ever so slightly over the surfaces of our home--on the yellow chair, across the floor, over the plants. The shapes created by the sun seemed like gifts--REAL hope predicting Spring. I wandered about, seeking those shapes out--as many as I could find, ever so glad for the light.

Notes

Within an ephemeral present, we return through memory to things, places, and events in the past in order to find purpose and direction in our lives. Meaningful time is elliptical time.
Vigen Guroian

I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room.

Blaise Pascal

May your imagination know the grace of perfect danger.

John O'Donohue

The amount of life I can put through my eyes is the amount I can see.

Ivan Albright

When I painted a chair recently, I noticed that I put the paint on indifferently, smoothly but without particular attention. The results were satisfactory but not in any sense beautiful. Does the attention in itself with which paint is applied in art actually change the effect of the paint? Does the kind of consciousness with which we act determine the quality of our actions? It would follow, if this were true that the higher the degree of consciousness, the higher the quality of art. I think it likely. Training in art is, then, a demand that students increase the consciousness with which they employ techniques that are, in themselves, ordinary.

Anne Truitt, Daybook

It was suggested to me that I would want to preface this reading tonight with a short statement about my philosophy of writing. Of course I don't want to do anything of the kind. My approach to literary problems is very much like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea for him. She put her finger inside the cup.

Flannery O'Connor