Let's face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can't see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.
Schiller died considering his "Ode to Joy" a failure — an idealist's fantasy unmoored from reality, a work of art that might have been of service perhaps for him, perhaps for a handful of others, "but not for the world." The young Beethoven was among those few it touched, and this was enough, more than enough — he took Schiller's bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time.
Art, on the otherhand, is ever-expanding, like the universe itself, with limitless new frontiers to explore and question, and with possibilities for unending growth, understanding, and emotion.
Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without.
All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.
3mo ago
The man of science must work with method and system, but the artist works by inspiration, and what the artist produces by inspiration the man of science can explain by analysis only after the fact.
3mo ago
The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and as such it is the very fountain of human expression and communication.
Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.
Showing films in theaters is good for audiences, because it's the best possible way of experiencing cinema. Showing films in theaters is good for filmmakers, because it amplifies the artistry and grandeur of the idiom. Showing films in theaters is good for communities, because it supports the local creative ecosystem and provides jobs in the neighborhood.
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.
4mo ago
The mind is so rarely modified by facts; it is modified by feeling, and feeling is modified by art.
