The Hammock Papers: Surmount experience.

16 June 2010

Surmount experience.

What I have been able to put into form seems infinitesimal compared with the variety of experience. It has to become a part of ne's world, a part of what one has to speak with -- one paints it slowly. To formulate the new experience into something takes time. Maybe the new place enlarges one's world a little. Maybe one takes one's own world along and cannot see anything else.

O'Keeffe climbing to the roof of Ghost Ranch

I can't understand people who want something badly but don't grab for it. I grabbed.

O'Keeffe, Ladder To The Moon

It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.
- Georgia O'Keeffe

No comments:

Post a Comment

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL