Quotes About Inspiration

Your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute - but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.

We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in-and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing-the only work you can do convincingly-is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

But curiously, while artists always have a myriad of reasons to quit, they consistently wait for a handful of specific moments to quit. Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work — for the place their work belongs.

The truth is that the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.

We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the "rules" inevitably follow.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler

Art is all about starting again

But while you may feel you're pretending that you're an artist, there's no way to pretend you're making art. Go ahead, try writing a story while pretending you're writing a story. Not possible.

well, David Bayles, to be exact — who began piano studies with a Master. After a few months' practice, David lamented to his teacher, "But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers." To which the Master replied, "What makes you think that ever changes?

It's a simple premise: follow the leads that arise from contact with the work itself, and your technical, emotional and intellectual pathway becomes clear.

vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.

It's easier to paint the angel's feet to another masterwork than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

Artists come together in the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice their art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share.

This book is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do.

Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: How does art get done? Why, often, does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?

Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light. What

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.

We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells into art?

But while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it's still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal — a "right answer" — than to give form to a new idea. It's easier to paint in the angel's feet to another's master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.

Lanier University

Oglethorpe University,

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.