hello, artist speaking

straight from the artist's mouth/quill/pen/pencil/typewriter

[hello-artistspeaking]

When you get to stamping in public...it's about time to give up portrait painting and sail for Europe.

John Singer Sargent

in the diary of Lucia Fairchild. Boston, October 2nd 1890

[marie-duplessis]

Letter from Édouard Manet to Mme Jules Guillemet, 1880

Translation: Bellevue, Thursday [July-August 1880] To Mme Jules Guillemet Nonsense if you will, dear Madame, but such sweet nonsense [sketches of her shoes and skirts] which enables me to spend my time very pleasantly. I’m getting better and better, and a letter from you now and then would help my cure along - so don’t be too economical with them.

I haven’t seen Mlle L. [Lemonnier], her mother is very ill and she is moving. Still, I’m surprised to have had no news from her. I hope you won’t find my letters a bore, you’ll tell me, won’t you, and send me your news soon E. Manet

[robert-hadley]

[hello-artistspeaking]

“An artist has to be the perfect contradiction at all times...You have to be just insane enough to want to do something that is so punishing and so difficult. But at the same time it takes a very sane person to execute it all.”

– Anicka Yi

pictured: “Maybe She’s Born With It” (2015)

[hello-artistspeaking]

That force of personality in Beethoven’s music is a result of a once-in-history level of compositional talent coexisting with a once-in-history level of stubbornness (or, to put more positively, idealism). This stubbornness - this refusal to accept things as they are, this will to imagine things as he wishes they were - is the greatest gift that comes from living full-time with Beethoven, and also the greatest source of frustration.

Jonathan Biss, “All over Beethoven” The Spectator 21 Dec 2019- 4 Jan 2020

[hello-artistspeaking]

The sun, the moon, the earth and stars are also polka dots. They cannot exist alone. Each and every one of us are polka dots. We gather and weave a beautiful pattern of polka dots.

Yayoi Kusama

[hello-artistspeaking]

John Singer Sargent - George Peabody, 1890. 85.1 x 66 cm oil on canvas

“A very fine looking old man - and very lively - yes, and charming, I should say - and tells killingly funny stories. But portrait painting...is very close quarters - a dangerous thing - no, I must say I had a very disagreeable time of it.”

– John Singer Sargent, in the diary of Lucia Fairchild. Boston, October 2nd 1890

[hello-artistspeaking]

For me the English draughtsmen are what Dickens is in the sphere of literature. It’s one and the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and something one always comes back to.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to Anthon van Rappard 19 September 1882

[barcarole]

From a conversation between Ernest Guiraud and Debussy, Debussy: Volume 1, 1862-1902: His Life and Mind (by Edward Lockspeiser)

[hello-artistspeaking]

Music enables me at particularly difficult moments to open up to this world of possibility and sense of joy. Nothing else gives me that feeling.

Marin Alsop

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

What is the use of art? The answer to this question resides in a formula: “art is a prayer.” — Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,—: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymously to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being— — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne Art is a wound turned into light. — Georges Braque

[hello-artistspeaking]

It seems to me that if one wants to be a serious artist today and create an original little niche for oneself, or at least ensure that one preserves the highest degree of innocence of character, one must constantly immerse oneself in solitude. There is too much tittle-tattle. It is as if paintings were made, like speculations on the stock market, out of the friction among people eager for gain. All this trading sharpens your mind and falsifies your judgment.

Edgar Degas

[hello-artistspeaking]

My hands are curious; I am curious. It's unbelievable to someone like me that someone doesn't pick up something to figure out how it works and where did it come from, and wonder who made it and how they made it.

Sheila Hicks

in “Epic Yarns” - WSJ Magazine Sept 2019

[hello-artistspeaking]

I don't work toward anything...But if someone tells me to walk left, I walk 10 feet right.

Sheila Hicks

in “Epic Yarns” - WSJ Magazine Sept 2019

[hello-artistspeaking]

I have a roving vision. There are no binoculars that I look through, and I am watching, discovering and thinking and processing.

Sheila Hicks

in “Epic Yarns” - WSJ Magazine Sept 2019

[moma]

In terms of existing, everything is equal.

Donald Judd, born today in 1928 (via moma)

[hello-artistspeaking]

Taste is the best judge. It is rare.

Paul Cézanne

letter to Émile Bernard, 12 May 1904