A Pause for Beauty:
An Artist’s Journal
The Meaning of Life is to See
The spirit of the object, if you sit long enough, will finally sneak through the back door and grab you.
- Andrew Wyeth
When you are not painting, you take notes. That is when the ideas come to you. But when it is time to paint, you put your notes away and immerse yourself in music for a long time. When you finally pick up the brush, there are no preconceptions or sketches and you feel completely serene. The image is born from under the brush and grows more and more distinct. Then, throwing hesitation to the winds, you set your brush to work — liquid ink does not permit procrastination, or else all is ruined and everything lost.
- Gao Xingjian from Return to Painting. Gao Xingjian is better known as a novelist than a painter.
In 2000, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He paints and draws with ink — abstract shapes,
impressionistic sketches. I sometimes sit down with his book when I feel my art is getting too precise,
too tight.
I rarely arrive at an idea by consciously sitting down at a desk and trying to figure out what I want to do. Once I start thinking about a project, though, it doesn't leave my focus until I have come up with an idea.
I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control. It is a process of percolation, with the form eventually finding its way to the surface…
I do not think that we can fully understand how one makes a specific mark upon a page –
at some point one has to trust one's eye,
one's intuition. I do not think that that implies a lack of rational thought. I just think that one cannot understand why one makes a specific move, that the creative act is a combination of conscious and subconscious thoughts that cannot or should not be deciphered.
My creative process balances analytic study, based very much on research, with, in the end, a purely intuited gesture. It is almost as if after months of thinking I shut that part of my brain down and allow the nonverbal side to react. It is this balance between the analytical and the intuitive, or between the left side and the right side of the brain, that is so much a part of these works.
- Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
from her book Boundaries
A genius is one who can see. The others can often "draw" remarkably well.
It is harder to see a landscape than to paint it. This is true because there are lots of clever people who can paint anything, but lacking the seeing power, paint nothing worthwhile.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit
In his memoir, Somerset Maugham described his writing style as one that, despite many weaknesses, had one great strength:
"I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me." His vocabulary was limited, his writing, he says, was without lyric quality, he had limited facility with metaphor and simile. He described himself as lacking imagination.
“On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the richness and strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sound. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed."
- Somerset Maugham from The Summing Up
The meaning of Life is to see.
- Hui Neng, 7th century sage
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