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There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.
-Robert Henri
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.John Keats, Endymion
Playing it safe in fantasy art means macabre, violent and, at times, terribly sexist imagery. To me, it's just lazy and uncreative. The struggle between good and evil never ceases to be exciting. But when the grotesque is glorified and beauty is seen as childish or weak, then we've taken a serious misstep.
A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.Tchaikovsky
I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way.Isabelle Allende
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. --C.S. Lewis, Till We Have FacesThere's a story that I really love about the composer Bach. He had composed this new piece of music, practicing it over and over with his musicians until it was absolutely perfect and had scheduled to play it at a church. Well, the day came, and Bach and his musicians had shown up to put on this concert when the caretaker had walked up, mortified, and said to Bach:
This is an excerpt from one of my favorite books. It is the last book in a series of three stories that started with a retelling of Swan Lake. All three are illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg. I love them. They resonate in a way that I still cannot define. So I thought I'd share this piece:
"Though once I was a singer of tales, they were not very good, for I always put too much of my heart in them, and never enough (I was told) of calculation. Where others would captivate and entertain, I would only sing a simple song that bent its head as if in prayer before time and truth and love. It was all I could do, and all I wanted to do, and I don't know why. I followed nature's wild rivers and God's glittering lights, and they led me into a land where I was alone.
. . . Long ago, in the time of the old emperor, I was young and just beginning in my profession. The usurper was there, and one could not escape his evil presence . . . there was a struggle between what was, in the main, good, and what was, in the main, evil, and that time after time the good prevailed made the children born in my time believe that this was the natural order of things, that even if it took a great deal of effort, effort would always find its reward and the just would triumph, as would the innocent.
I still believe, which is why I am on a hillside waiting. And I certainly believed then, even as the usurper began to gain the upper hand. Surely, I thought, the crimes that bring him power will soon bring him down . . . I did not change my songs, as did the other singers who listened carefully to everything that was new, and soon I found that I was nowhere, they were everywhere, and the usurper had taken the throne.
Can you imagine my surprise the day that he sent for me? Why would he bother with a singer of the old songs? Why would he bother with me? But he did bother. He cared inordinately . . . I was so afraid that my heels shook as if in an earthquake. As soon as he began to speak, however, I realized that I need not have feared. Either he would kill me, and I would have eternal peace, or I would beat him with courage alone.
. . . I was expecting to die right then and there, but he said, "I order you to unravel your singing."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Unravel it!"
"Meaning, sir?"
"Your songs," he said impatiently. "Undo them."
"I can't. The're already sung."
"Then sing them again, differently. Sing them so that they are about me. Sing them so that when people hear them they will weep for my sacrifices and admire my powers."
At this I laughed, which must have astonished him, knowing as he did what he had in mind for me. "I would not laugh if I were you," he warned.
"Why not laugh?" I asked. "I know how you will torture me, but I know that I will not sing the songs as you would have me sing them. You might as well try to burn water, because I'm water, and water doesn't burn."
I spent then the next years of my life - the longest years I remember - in the deepest torture chambers underneath the loftiest prisons. By some chance or interference I refused to die, day after day, until finally the armies of the young queen captured the city and freed us all. No longer a singer, and fit only to be a soldier, I joined the victorious armies just as most everyone else was leaving them. Of low rank, broken memories, and no prospects, I knew nonetheless that a new struggle was inevitable.
. . . "Why didn't you simply alter your songs?" he asked, gazing at my scars, of which there are so many that even to this day I can be only a man alone.
"I couldn't."
"Why?"
"They had already been sung. They existed."
"But why not change them as requested?"
This question puzzled me. "Never was there the possibility that I would do that."
"Why?" Notorincus pressed.
"I suppose it's because they're like people," I said. "They may be like dumb or ugly people, or people who are deformed, but I couldn't just take their names, annihilate them, and issue new ones, could I?"
"I suppose not, if you think they're like people but are they really?"
"Yes," I answered, nodding. "They have in them something, sometimes a great deal, of the people I love, some of whom are lost forever. Therefore, I could not have split them like wood, or carved them like stone. It would have been a betrayal, and it would have corrupted the world."
"The whole world?"
"Just my part of it," I said, "but this is, after all, the part for which I am responsible."
"You would have died rather than abandon the old songs?"
"Yes."
"But life is so precious."
"Yes."
"It is paramount."
"No."
"No? Then what is?"
"Love," I said, "and honor."
"Excellent!" said Notorincus. "Excellent! . . . And you? Can you still sing tales? The queen loves the singing of tales."
"No," I answered. "I cannot. I have in me only one more tale, and I must wait to see it before I can sing it.""
The Veil of Snows, Mark Helprin
“When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It is very strange for me to discover this, and very dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact… I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted in peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.”
—
“It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
—
“The more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
— Vincent van Gogh
“I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost.”
— Vincent van Gogh
“People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”
— Monet
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
- Albert Einstein
“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist—a master—and that is what Auguste Rodin was—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with sensitivity see that this lovely young girl is still alive.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.’”
| - Hugh MacLeod |
“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it does not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.”
— George MacDonald
“To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts, seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.”
- George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture”
