photography was a massive intervention into our knowledge, our consciousness

You get so used to photos, you think, I know that guy, but it's not true... You know the world of the photos, but not the world they photographed. I can't remember it. The photos create a world, but I don't know what's happening outside the frame.

Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter Painting

now is blessed the rest remembered

"Keep the channel open.
No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others."

— martha graham

"Talking to other people helps. Reading helps. And heroes People you want to honor, not exactly trying to emulate them, but by living according to the same principles they did. Sandino, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Vanessa Redgrave, willing to jeopardize her career. There are a lot of people who inspire you. My family helps; my wife thinks the same way I do. And friends.
Also, you’ve got to think of the consequences if nobody does talk. You’ve got people driving this machine who are going to drive it right off the cliff. If you care anything about the planet and the people on it, you’ve got to keep out there.
I think it’s important to continue to be vocal. Sometimes it seems like nobody’s listening, but people are listening What it eventually gets down to, though, is just living with yourself. If you don’t live by the principles you believe in, then you become this hollow person."

— Kris Kristofferson

"Come away, o human child:
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more
Full of weeping than you
Can understand."

— william butler yeats

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

Van Gogh: A Self-Portrait; Letters Revealing His Life as a Painter

page 162

I so hope everything will come out right, but her future as well as my own looks gloomy. I am inclined to believe there is some latent good in her still, but the trouble is, it ought to have been roused already. Now, as she has nobody to rely on it will be more difficuly for her to follow her good impulses.

page 170

I shall find things to paint everywhere. It is spelendid here, and I think I learn to paint somewhat better while painting. And my heart is in it, I need not tell you that.

page 172

One's real life begins at thirty, infact, that is to say, it's most active part.

page 174

Zola says, "Moi artiste, je veux vivre tout haut-veux vivre" [I, as an artist, want to live as vigorously as possible-want to live]

How fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn't feel himself small, who doesn't realize he is but an atom.

What shall I do now? The common phrase is, "What is your aim, what are your aspirations?" Oh, I shall do as I think best - how? I can't say that before hand - you who ask me that pretentious question, do you know what YOUR aim is, what YOUR intentions are?

page 175

Now they tell me, "You are unprincipled when you have no aim, no aspirations." My answer is, I didn't tell you I had no aim, no aspirations, I said it is the height of coneceit to try to force one to define what is indefinable.

These are my thoughts about certain questions. All that arguing about it is one of the things of which I say "embêtera"

just get to work

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. 

Chuck Close

ode to the hwy

oil on canvas

jim in HWY

it's not done yet but im so excittted

when all else fails, we can whip the horses eyes, and make them sleep

My relationship to reality has been so utterly skewed for so long that I don’t even notice it any more. It’s just my reality.

ethan hawke

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

salvador dalí

Not that I thought that I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around-something like Red did,

A new world of art was opening up my mind. Sometimes early in the day we'd go uptown to the city museums, see giant oil-painted canvases by artists like Velizquez, Goya, Delacroix, Rubens, El Greco. Also twentieth-century stuff-Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Rouault, Bonnard. Suze's favorite current modernist artist was Red Grooms, and he became mine, too. I loved the way everything he did crushed itself into some fragile world, the rickety clusters of parts all packed together and then, standing back, you could see the complex whole of it all. Grooms's stuff spoke volumes to me. He was the artist I checked out most. Red's stuff was extravagant, his work cut like it was done by acid. All of his mediums-crayon, watercolor, gouache, sculpture or mixed media-collage tableaus I liked the way he put the stuff together. It was bold, announced its presence in glaring details. There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang. It seemed to be on the same stage. What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually-all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys-all. the carnie vitality. Red was the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world. He incorporated every living thing into something and made it scream-everything side by side created equal-old tennis shoes, vending machines, alligators that crawled through sewers, dueling pistols, the Staten Island Ferry and Trinity Church, 42nd Street, profiles of skyscrapers. Brahman bulls, cowgirls, rodeo queens and Mickey Mouse heads, castle turrets and Mrs. O'Leary's cow, creeps and greasers and weirdos and grinning, bejeweled nude models, faces with melancholy looks, blurs of sorrow-everything hilarious but not jokey. Familiar figures from history, too Lincoln, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rembrandt-all done with graphic finesse, burned out as powerful as possible. I loved the way Grooms used laughter as a diabolical weapon. Subconsciously, I was wondering if it was possible to write songs like that.

About that time I began to make some of my own drawings. I actually picked up the habit from Suze, who drew a lot. What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils and knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I'd lose track of time completely. An hour or two could go by and it would seem like only a minute. Not that I thought that I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around-something like Red did, but he did it on a much grander level. In a strange way I noticed that it purified the experience of my eye and I would make drawings of my own for years to come.

chronicles by bob dylan

art was a religious-like calling

There was a very high value placed on the arts in my family. None of them were artists, but they loved books and movies and music. I grew up with people who believed that at its best art was a religious-like calling. I mean, my stepfather thought Bob Dylan was the greatest religious figure of the 20th century – and in a way he’s right, you know. They were also people who didn’t define success in financial terms and I think that’s had a very big influence on me.

telegraph - interview with john preston - june 2010

i left you because i love you

My skin is tight underneath the tear, dried upon my cheeks the night I cried.
When I smiled Good Morning to you, my crow's feet let you know that I lied.
Please let me give these gifts of mine to the woman who eyes shined on my back
as I slept. I left you because I loved you.

PAMELA

studied art at los angeles city college, designed clothes for jim and friends, ran a boutique, went by "pamela roselily"... i wish there was more known about her. 

click  to read a cool article about themis

it's not the bomb that has to go man, it's the museums

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Bob Dylan Interview, by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston. 1965

you're just given the task of bringing it up

The only way to really make it

—anywhere—

is to put every bit of your being into the thing that only you can provide. 

The only angle is the art that you choose, that only you can provide.

And to do that, you have to be quiet for a long time and find out what you bring forth. 

You have to know what's in yourself

—all your eccentricities, all your banalities, the full flavor of your woe and your joy. 

What does it look like? What does it feel like? What makes it different from everybody else's? 

It's totally subjective. 

You're just given the task of bringing it up.

a song can do incredible things incredibly fast

I have a few things I think about when I need to get distance again. I think about a surface of a pool, you know, like a tidal pool, or a very still pond with ripples on it, and I try to imagine that. And sometimes I think of a glacial plain, a sort of blue ice color. Sometimes I try to think of my heart or my center becoming hard, cold and hard.

Well, I think "great art" is a pompous phrase. To me, that's a little tough to swallow and it's tough to spit out, too. I think Sam Cooke singing "I Taught My Baby How to Cha Cha Cha" is a terrific song, but you'd have a hard time calling it great art.

I consciously have tried to steal a couple of Ray Charles' phrases. If we listened to a show, I could point out a couple of points where it was like that. I could point out what I consider to be a Jackson Browne phrase without consciously trying to steal . . . Yeah, sure I try to; I consciously try to take a lot of things that I really admire.

And I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.

 I'm into the nuclear thing because it's so clearly insane. The problem for me is to become politically active: I'm not a scientist and I'm not a politician and I'm not an economist; I'm not a student of social trends. My credentials are only as a musician who entertains people.

I did a lot of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, you know. And everybody has the blues -- that's what it comes down to.

 I have a few personal ideas having to do with my family situation and things like that. But in fact I can't really explain it away very well. I'm still subject to it from time to time. Sort of like unexplainable onsets of black moods. But I've grown used to it and know how to deal with them.

It starts with just not feeling terribly well. But there's a type of despair that I experience as being very deep.

As difficult as it is for us both to be in the same business, there's the benefit of our really understanding and being able to support each other. 'Cause we really know about it. When I find her being worried about something that's really bullshit, I can, with real authority, tell her that she's worrying about something that doesn't deserve her attention. And she's the same way, too.

It's hard for me to talk about Joni because I still feel very strongly about her. I saw her recently, and she and I spent a little time talking. Not to get into what our personal relationship was like, but I've never seen anyone create the way she does. An aspect of that leaves another side of her life lacking. She, more than I, I think, has a need for creativity, for her art. More of a need to relieve herself, to satisfy herself, than almost anyone else I've ever met.

If I could get some kind of a hold on myself, I could be able to direct this capacity I have to share my point of view with other people. A song can do incredible things incredibly fast.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9313120/the_rs_interview_james_taylor

evolution

a picture of jeff

my first sketch

oil pastels

katemoss

art isn't separate-jeff buckley

An artist isn't separate from a person who isn't or doesn't feel they're an artist. There's artistry in human beings; it's just a human function. I find answers from music all the time. But because I most identify with music as a way of expressing myself, I just find most of my answers there. Other people find it through painting or art or teaching or murder. 

 I would be completely insane if I couldn't make music. Or I'd take up sculpture, and if I didn't have sculpture I'd take up screenplays, and if I didn't have that I'd take up something else. Anything artistic. But music seems to me to be the most closely identified with my soul. I mean, I feel that it's the best for me. It just gets into the bloodstream so quickly, for no reason at all. You can close your heart, and you can sleep even with your eyes closed, but you can never close your ears. 

SIENNA

 I think with any woman, if you’re feeling a bit down and you put on a great jacket or a great top, you can feel a little bit better about yourself with clothes, but I think people think I’m more fashion-y than I actually am as a person. I don’t have a stylist; I don’t plan outfits. It’s quite thrown together and I often look quite disheveled. But I think clothes and bright colors can definitely help a mood, the way you feel, yeah.

Just from watching other actors and going back and watching films like Oh Boy, there are certain things I can do to keep me inspired. I’m not somebody who sits there and I’m not a self-nurturer. I think I’m more hard on myself than that. Maybe that’s something I should try to be better at, but I think I draw massive inspiration from art and poetry and literature and other great actors and other great performances, and I’m nutured by that. 

quotes from buzzine