"Art is indeed not the bread, but the wine of life." Jean Paul
(quote shared by Leona Gamble, see her "As Above, So Below" below at the end of the blog)
In celebration of the layers in language and in image; SRATA artists share some final thoughts via quotes... I hope you will fill your cup with these promises and cheers to the artists!
Mark Weller
“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for there; for there are species on this planet that have a survivability quotient that far exceed that of the Homo sapiens."
Gaylord Nelson
Justin Auld
“Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose peeling you can find every name and word that you can imagine. Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar things, which may bring you honor, because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.”
Leonardo da Vinci
Bill Saltzstein
“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”
Earl Grenville Killeen
My chosen quote is from Leona Gamble (the artist whose painting adorns the cover of the “Strata” exhibit book). Her sensitive and compassionate words about the artistic process and journey have lifted my spirits and bolstered my perseverance.
Leona's painting “Gathering” of all her sublimely beautiful work, is my favorite. Her painting “Gathering” which, of all her sublimely beautiful work, is my favorite.
“My work is very deeply connected to my core self. I love the winding journey they take me on in creating them.
Ah please never feel like you have lost time, as this journey is a meandering one that is a lifetime of becoming. I am still discovering myself. . . I mean to say, be kind to yourself about your journey and your timing. It’s perfect and there is no finish line. This is actually part of the artistic process and curse. I always say it feels like a fever, or an itch you can’t scratch. That trying to find something out of nothing and you have the urge and drive to create but nothing is coming forth yet. Be patient with this, it seems to be a very common and uncomfortable thing for us artists.”
Leona Gamble
Kristi Ekern
“Into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”
-John Muir (Conservationist and Father of the National Parks)
Bob Conge
Good advice when drawing...
"Teach us to care and not to care”
From the poem "Ash Wednesday” by T. S. Elliot
David Blow
“Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?”
Michael Bernard Beckwith “Don’t listen to what I’m saying. Listen to what I’m listening to.”
Michael Bernard Beckwith
"You can hear them from across the street, grackles. Their sound is a harsh cackle, and loud. I represent both the vibration of sound and movement with graphic shapes with images of the grackles. The colors of the palette were taken from the photograph that I took. By layering the colored shapes and images I am able to suggest a holy atmosphere. Do you see what I hear?"
David Blow
Mireille Ribiere
"You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be – a constantly living thing."
Cornelia Parker
"Having one of my photographs shown as part of the STRATA exhibition has made me realize the importance of layers in my work. At times my emphasis is on the inherent complexity of what I photograph (Clärchens Ballhaus, On Reflection). But layers can also be created through a variety of techniques and materials: I used a lightbox to show simultaneously both sides of single sheets of newsprint (Of Riches and Rags), printed on translucent paper so that images would partially merge (To the Trees), or, more simply still, often layered text over images (25 Mornings, On Standby, WordedImages). In all these cases the complexity of the resulting artwork is borne of the tension or friction between its constituents, opening up numerous potential interpretations."
Mireille Ribiere
Liz Thoresen
"There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have Art."
Leonora Carrington
Jack Straton
"A remarkable relation between the brightness of these [variable-brightness stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud] and the length of their [pulsation] periods will be noticed.… A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods…. Since the variables are probably at nearly the same distance from the Earth, their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light…."
[Henrietta Leavitt articulating her 1912 discovery of the natural law that is the basis for our ability to measure distances to the galaxies, and ultimately to measure the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years.]
Ronald Conrad
“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
Jean Cocteau
Linda Trytek
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
Anita Rama
“Creation is always in the dark. Because, you can only do the work of making by not knowing quite what you are doing, by walking into the darkness, not staying in the light.”
Rebecca Solnit
Ray Lee
"It’s taken me years to come to the conclusion that probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change. And it’s a very difficult thing. But as modern artists that’s our fate, constant change. I don’t mean novelty or anything like that. What I mean is that this serious play, which we call art, can’t be static. I mean you have to learn how to play in new ways, all the time."
Philip Guston
Leona Gamble
