“• I hope to encourage you. I hope to show you that art isn’t just for the gifted. It’s not a talent you need to be born with. All of us, ALL OF US are artists. You don’t have to make art a career. You don’t need to paint to be an artist. Your art might be music or dance or poetry or knitting—or whatever you do to create something good to bring into this world. We’re all artists in some way. Wherever our passions lie. In that thing we do that brings us joy.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“• It’s a sad commentary on our society that artists are so often depicted as degenerates and derelicts. Tragic and disheveled subhu¬mans with nowhere to live and not a penny to their name. I mean, it’s kind of true, but it’s still hurtful.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“• Artists are more than our art. We’re more than what we do. We’re mothers or sisters or uncles or sons. We’re friends or teammates or class¬mates or neighbors. We’re Hes and Shes and Theys and Thems. We have beliefs in greater things, be it our Gods or the Universe or ourselves. We’re more than artists—and we can do more than just BE artists. We can be kind.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“We all feel the pangs of imposter syndrome or the dread of not being good enough or the emptiness of artist’s block. Regardless of what medium you use to make art, please know that we are all struggling alongside you.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“I think the best thing I’ve learned to do is to listen. Listen to marginalized groups. Listen to people with disabilities. Listen to women. Listen to people of color. Listen to people in foreign lands. Listen to people who worship differently than you. Listen to people who love differently than you. Listen to people who are suffering. Listen to people who just need someone to hear them. Listen.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“No one has the right to tell others what to do. Not in their art. And absolutely not in their personal lives. We should never tell others how to act. How to dress. How to talk. How to love. How to worship. There is so much beauty in our diversity. In our uniqueness. Our job as artists is to celebrate that. To see the beauty and joy in what makes us different.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“Art is creation. It’s taking a blank page and turning it into a poem. Stretching out an empty canvas and breathing life onto it with the stroke of a brush and a swath of paint. It’s sitting before a quiet piano and wak¬ing it up with a song. Where there was nothing, an artist creates some¬thing. Something beautiful. Thought-provoking. Tragic. Controversial. That’s what artists do: We create.”
Source: Becoming an Artist: How to Make Art Like a Human by Embracing Failure, Discovering Your Creative Voice & Finding Joy in the Process
“This shell was a thing different from me but also the truest part of me, the explanation of who I was, my portrait translated into a rhythmic system of volumes and stripes and colors and hard matter, and it was the portrait of her as she was, because at the same time she was making herself a shell identical to mine and without knowing it I was copying what she was doing and she without knowing it was copying what I was doing, and all the others were copying all the others, so we would be back where we had been before except for the fact that in saying these shells were the same I was a bit hasty, because when you looked closer you discovered all sorts of little differences that later on might become enormous.”
Source: Cosmicomics
“Understanding the kind of art we want to create, while focusing on the things that spark our interest, can be really helpful in setting our feet in the right direction.”
Source: Wayfinder: The Art of Gretel Lusky
“Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact… The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot.”
—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine, p. 377; originally: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177–178. Archive.org”