sensory awareness to tell what the world is made of

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist. The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it is anti-utopian, it's a realm of anti values And the artist who comes in contact with the present produces an avant-garde image which is terrifying to the contemporaries. Marshall McLuhan

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan Debating 1968

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

the first thing you should learn

“A lot of bad stuff is gonna happen to you. People are not gonna love you back, and if you’re serious about becoming an artist, that’s the first thing you should learn. And, listen, you’re gonna die, okay? Relatively soon, okay? So, that being said, you have nothing to worry about.”

The Hottest State

it's really nice to have good friends that do what you do

"I like putting things together that are a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I would never wear my street clothes onstage. I do appreciate the fact that people have left their house to come to a show.”

“I am a very emotional person. If I am feeling very strongly about something, I write a song about it.”

venus zine -  june 2008*

"I was always trying to prove that I could do everything that the boys could do. I had such an attitude. I had a tough-guy problem. I wanted to be bulletproof."

village voice - may 2007

"I used to bleach my hair blonde [in my teens]. I was wearing some sort of hideous polyester light-blue pantsuit or something, and my friend said, 'Joan, you are channelling Angie Dickinson from Police Woman!' The other [show I loved] was Charlie's Angels. But that was always bikinis and fluffy hair curling. Angie was a different vibe."

"I'm a person who likes to put myself in uncomfortable positions, if I think I'm going to learn from them. Now I'm more comfortable feeling vulnerable. Before, I was so obsessed with being tough. I was bulletproof, which, if you ever act like that, you know it's the absolute opposite of how you feel.".

sydney morning herald - sept 2006

...it's really nice to have good friends that do what you do. The fact is, in New York City you can't really get away from it, it's like everyone's an artist – everyone! I've lived here for a long time and I have a group of friends that I really look forward to seeing. That's why I love living here, because of the people, I think that's true for most people.

yorkshire evening post - november 2008

advice to young artist

Trust in yourself no matter what people say. The other side of the coin is, don’t trust them no matter what compliment they give you. Only trust in your instinct about the work.

yoko

the first thing you should learn

“A lot of bad stuff is gonna happen to you. People are not gonna love you back, and if you’re serious about becoming an artist, that’s the first thing you should learn. And, listen, you’re gonna die, okay? Relatively soon, okay? So, that being said, you have nothing to worry about.”

The Hottest State