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Feb 2

“

In the studio or on the road, many artists find they’re at their most creative when they’re simply on the lookout for joy.

When a job has some sort of outside payoff—typically cash—it’s known as an “extrinsic reward.” When there’s no payoff except for the joy, it’s known as an “intrinsic reward.” Experts are now seeing intrinsic reward as the silver bullet of motivation and a principal key to evolved work.

”

Robert Genn

Jan 24

“In recent years, Mayan scholars and Mayan leaders have objected to the obsession with gloom and cataclysm. ‘For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of their cycle,’ says Sandra Nobe, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies in Crystal River, Fla. To render Dec. 21, 2012, as a doomsday event or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is a ‘complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.’”

Eric Francis

“You feel resistance because your body does not know it can make a choice that is not painful.”

Carrie of Hot Yoga Downtown, Albuquerque, NM

Nov 15

“It is a mistake to label the hypothetical as impossible simply because it contradicts the status quo. All progress contradicts the status quo. That is how progress functions.”

Oct 15

“When I look at history , at building ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the Sphynx, the pyramids, the Mayan temples, what it tells me is that no matter how technologically advanced we are today, we’ve lost something tremendous that came thousands & thousands of years ago, and it’s a tragedy that not only have we forgotten how to use it, but we’ve relegated it to the realm of folklore and mythology.”

Nick Redform

Oct 4

Disconnection with the earth - Mistakes ~ Wonders

In my haste to select some colors out of my disorganized paint box (disorganized due to my hasty packing in NYC and hasty unpacking in New Mexico), I didn’t really read the labels.

As I noticed how oddly the paint was mixing with water, I considered that the paints are old. Friends often dump their unused supplies on me, and I gladly take anything. Sure there’s crust at the end of the tube, but there’s something squishy inside. Old paints to me are like aged perfume - different, yes, but not exactly bad. Actually interesting.

But washing a brush in the bathroom, I noticed with frustration that the paint wasn’t washing out. Oil paints have a distinct smell to them, and I suppose my nose must be a bit blocked up because it was not until I came to terms with the stubborn black smudges and globs in the sink that it finally dawned on me I grabbed a whole bunch of oil paints without realizing it.

This ruled out the possibility of using any plant matter - I have not experimented with oil and organic matter yet, and doubt that it would be very successful as a quick drying time is essential to my process.

But sometimes mistakes turn into pleasant surprises.

One must wonder whether mistakes really exist after all.

There are moments we never forget in life. Sometimes we don’t know why we have not forgotten them like so many other forgotten moments; we were not intending to hold onto the details as they occurred and their significance is not clear. And yet they remain forever etched, surfacing at times that only accentuate our inability to understand why we are remembering, and why now.

Other memories contain clear lessons.

When I was young, my older sister and I did not get along. We were both artists, and I think the one thing we respected about one another was our respective talents. Grumbling once over a mistake I made in a sketch, my sister reprimanded my dissatisfaction in an eerily authoritative and wise voice, “True artists always know how to fix their mistakes.”

This was an eery statement because I know her to throw out failed works and start over. But I took this wisdom to heart every time an image seemed to falter thereafter. Those words acted as a pressure against my confidence, always bending me towards a greater will to succeed.

The onset of feeling failure is a stressful moment. Interestingly, this painting began as a loose imitation of a photo I had seen before, an image of a very stressed woman. Her anxiety was beautiful, and it reminded me of a quote:

Stress is basically disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.

—Natalie Goldberg

I believe that stress is most commonly experienced when things don’t go as we planned. Our inability to control the situation frustrates us, to the point at which we close ourselves off to the possibilities that are present.

Every seeming mistake is an opportunity. When we remain connected to the earth, to our breath - to innate purpose and being, we can begin to see these opportunities.

Sep 17

“Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.”

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, p. 29

Sep 7

“More problematic research shows that people need to be a bit nuts to excel, and that nut cases excel particularly well when under stress. But very few of the truly excellent artists I know might be classified as nuts. Underutilization of therapists is widespread in the visual arts. I think it’s because we often prefer to take our own advice, but I may be nuts.”

Robert Genn

Aug 20

“I think that should have been a ‘Bill of Responsibility,’ not a ‘Bill of Rights.’ ‘Cause people talk about their rights, their rights, but they never talk about their responsibility. And leadership has got to have that above all. They’ve got to have vision, they’ve got to have compassion for the future.”

Oren Lyons

Aug 14

“There are early-fall days in New York so staggeringly beautiful, so laden with the promise of fall beauty still to come, that to experience them is, you tell yourself, worth all the money and hassle, all the striving and frenzy, that it takes simply to live in Manhattan. The leaves are still green and the air hasn’t turned cool yet, but it isn’t hot anymore, either. There’s a crispness to it that siphons off the brown industrial haze that hovers over the skyline during the humid days of July and August, leaving the air as clear and crystalline as God ever intended.”

Gwen Cooper, Homer’s Odyssey, p. 184

Jul 15

“Given their [The Pierces] talent, the wonder is that nobody has noticed them before. They’ve been releasing albums on American labels since 2000, but claim the records were barely promoted so they went more or less unheard. This was despite them ‘casting spells’ to change their luck, something they’re a bit sheepish about now. ‘We didn’t use snake blood or eye of newt or anything, it was more visualization,’ Allison says. ‘Some people think you can create your own reality, and that’s what we wanted, but we had to work through a lot of emotional shit first.’”

Caroline Sullivan, “The Pierces: ‘We’re not poppy. We sound pop-u-lar!’” The Guardian

May 26

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for that of the world.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Apr 29

“The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.”

Willem de Kooning

Apr 20

“

I was having one of those conversations. The kind that goes like this: Weren’t you nervous about moving so far away? How could you just leave home like that? Weren’t you worried it would be dangerous? And what about your children? I mean, you’re not even citizens there……And afterall, it’s not exactly like you were moving to FRANCE or …. [insert somewhere “civilized”].

Oh, I’ve had these conversations before. The kind where I know that the person is covertly thinking….That woman’s a little, well ….. CRAZY. And then they make a cuckoo finger twirling motion near their ear when I’m not looking.

But here’s the thing: No I wasn’t worried. Because you can look at the world in two ways. A place where you should always wear your seat belt. Or a place where you shouldn’t always wear your seat belt. You can worry about the What Ifs. Or you can say I can deal with the What Ifs. Because when you travel off the beaten path, bad stuff will happen (and it might be bad stuff that you have never even heard of before). But good stuff will happen, too (and it’s often extra good stuff that you could have never imagined). *You see it’s a law of nature — the universe rewards you when you are brave.*

And after a while you get good, really good, at not wearing your seat belt. So good that you choose not only not to wear one, but to ride on the running board of the car. *You see it’s another law of nature — when you stick your head out, the wind blows though your hair. *

”

Maryam Montague, My Marrakash

Mar 29

“People in the West do not show the same respect for spiritual practitioners that they show for scientists. In more ancient societies, however, especially those that have retained a close kinship to Mother Earth, the spiritual practitioner is accorded either equal or better treatment as that given to a physician. In this understanding of the importance of keeping a balance between spiritual and physical health, indigenous people are light years ahead of the so-called “modern” civilizations.”

Robert Laremy, Complete Book of Baths, p. 9

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