2. Learn to Draw
- Drawing is more than a tool for rendering and capturing likenesses.
- It is a language, with its own syntax, grammar, and urgency.
- Learning to draw is about learning to see.
- In this away, it is a metaphor for all art activity.
- Whatever its form, drawing transforms perception and thought into image and teaches us how to think with our eyes.
3. "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
- Whatever we know, we know from the world that surrounds us.
- Art studies the world, in all its manifestations, and renders back to us not simply how we see, but how we react to what we see and what we know as a consequence of that seeing.
- The world is the source of all of our relationships, social and political as well as aesthetic.
- Art is a part of the world, not apart from it.
4. Art is the product of process
- Whether conceptual, experimental, emotional, or formal, the process you develop yields the image you produce.
- The material you choose, the methods of production, and the sources of the images should all reflect the interests that command your attention.
- The process does not stop with each work completed. It is ongoing. The cumulative result of that process is a body of work.
7. "Tradition is the record of imaginative experience." - Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition
- Art describes the world in which it is made. That is its value to us. It tells us where we have been and where we are.
14. All images are abstractions.
- Even photographs.
- They are never the thing pictured; they are a conceptual or mechanical reproduction of a thing past.
- As pictures are symbolic assemblages of forms, recognizable or not, they are always metaphors.
- Metaphor is the medium of symbolic language and is the language of art.
15. "The unconscious is that which we know, or have experienced, but for which we do not have a name." - Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle
- Images are catalytic as well as cognitive.
- This is what gives images their special power and why, through the ages, they have been attributed to have dangerous and magical qualities.
- Images can be retained in memory as experience.
25. Style is the consequence of something being described in the way most appropriate to its content.
- Style is the by-product of saying what has to be said in the most appropriate way a maker can say it.
26. Abstraction comes from the world.
- It is less a distillation than it is an accretion.
- Composition, harmony, proportion, light, color, line, texture, mass and motion are all part of the vocabulary of sight.
- The commonality that allows us to respond to images, even abstract ones, is rooted in our ability to recognize infinite manifestations of the physical world and the mental constructs to which they correspond.
42. Art has no boundaries except those imposed by the needs of the maker.
- Boundaries are a form of definition, nothing more.
- They are a way to create a heirarchy of concerns, interests and priorities.
- Boundaries change all the time. That is part of what art does.
- By defining an area of interest or by stating a new priority, art allows us to create new definitions of ourselves and the context in which we operate.
64. Art is a form of experimentation.
- But most experiments fail.
- Do not be afraid of those failures. Embrace them. Without courting the possibility of something [going wrong] you may not take the risks necessary to expand beyond habitual ways of thinking and working.
- Failed experiments lead to unexpected revelations.
85. The studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.
- It is the place where your practice is established, and the place where you experiment and meditate on the results....[it is] your locus as an artist.
93. Cultivate your idiosyncrasies.
- Every hand, every eye, every brain comes with its own built-in distortions. These distortions represent your signature, your personal slant on the world. When they manifest themselves in your work, do not be afraid to embrace them as long as they do not represent an impediment to some larger objective or overshadow everything else the image contains.
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