Prompt: Quote, 1

CORY ARCANGEL

“Keep doing what you like to do. That’s all it is.”

My relationship with art over the years has been extremely complicated, which is part of why i will have done college for so long; I resisted the things I do well hard and tried to do other things instead. Art and Writing were too personal, being my few skills (my prowess at which I actually doubted), and I didn't want people to take those things away from me by trying to do them seriously. There was this perception on the inside that if people told me how shit I actually was at them, that then I wouldn't enjoy them anymore and there'd be no point in the pursuit. I had few enough skills, and I didn't want to sacrifice the ones closest to myself.

So after about 3 years of chasing the wrong major I gave up and threw myself wildly in the direction that everything kept pushing me towards-- painting-- and I also found out how wrong i was.

There's a lot of discipline in art creating; a lot of making myself work when I'd otherwise rather be languishing. There's a lot of frustration and tears and I'm still floating uncertainly in terms of what my stuff is worth, intellectually and otherwise, but I think that's endemic to the process, or, at least, my process. But I do actually enjoy it. And following it seriously has not, and hopefully will not, remove the enjoyment factor from the thing. I have also since learned that people cannot take this from me-- I might leave certain circles which are unwelcoming, but the artmaking is a product of myself. I must make myself continue it, but as long as I do, it won't be removed from me. 

Even within the art practice, development has mostly been a case of tearing down artificial walls I created between teh concepts of what I was allowed to do and what I wanted to do. I created these ridiculously complex hierarchies of hobby art I do in my spare time, and "Real art" i did for school (and I still address those, even though I have realized that if I draw that distinction, when I actually have time to CHOOSE what I'm doing I won't work on the "Real art" unless the real art IS the art I want to make.). I never thought I'd ever be allowed to paint on bits of cloth or spend so much time and effort on materials experiments, which do fail. Quite a lot, actually. And they might yet fail-- it's very possible that every painting I'm currently making in cloth will literally disintegrate over the next five years-- but as of right now, people respond enthusiastically to the paintings on cloth. I also never thought that it would ever be appropriate to paint AON and my cast of other extremely fantastical, symbol-laded, colorful animals. Their symbol-laden nature allows them to function effectively as allegories for what happens in my daily life, though, to make points in my paintings or other things. I'm still pretty sure it'll hard to get people to take them seriously, but that doesn't rally matter anymore; I'm taking them seriously, and enjoying it, no matter how delightfully childish it is, and I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that matters.

This whole learning process has mostly been a set of euphoric discoveries that yes, I am  really allowed to do that. That there is nobody telling me I'm not allowed to do that. If I can justify something, I can do it. It may not work, it may not net me any success, but that only matters if those are the end goals. If my goal instead is to have a dialogue with a piece of cloth and some colored dirt suspended in plant goo, have a good time with it, and paint something I want to paint, then i've achieved my goals, and all other goals are secondary.

FOR MY OWN NOTES, the quotes to choose from were;

CORY ARCANGEL

“Keep doing what you like to do. That’s all it is.”

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

“I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.”

LYNDA BENGLIS

“I totally believe that art is an open dialogue and that it is not logical. It does not always make sense.”

EDWARD HOPPER

“So many people say painting is fun. I don’t find it fun at all. It’s hard work for me.”

YAYOI KUSAMA

“I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.”

GLENN LIGON

“My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.”

AGNES MARTIN

“That which takes us by surprise—moments of happiness—that is inspiration.”

ANA MENDIETA

“My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe.”

ELIZABETH MURRAY

“I want to make a beautiful, beautiful thing, something that gives you ideas about how life can be.”

BRUCE NAUMAN

“What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.”

LOUISE NEVELSON

“I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.”

SUSAN ROTHENBERG

“I think artists almost always end up turning to what’s around them, what’s in their environment or outside their window.”

CINDY SHERMAN

“I wanted to create something that people could relate to without having read a book about it beforehand.”

 

KIKI SMITH

“I think making things beautiful is important. But often what’s first considered ugly is beautiful, too.”

CHUCK CLOSE

“Inspiration is for amateurs.”

SAMUEL BECKETT

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

LARRY RIVERS TO DAVID HOCKNEY

"Do you want your work to be beautiful or interesting?"