Excerpts From The Art Spirit

My mother gave me the book The Art Spirit this past spring to replace the Gloria Steinham book that I lost while visiting. Not only did it quickly take hold after losing a book that I was already engrossed in, it opened up so much inspiration and creativity for me. It literally cleansed my brain of all the criticisms I felt wounded by from my last art teacher. I was free again to paint from my heart and away from some intellectualized way of approaching the craft. I really want to share some amazing advice that I gathered from it:

"It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself."

"He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of this subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints..."

"Don't try to paint good landscapes. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting the landscape looks to you - your pleasure in the thing. Wit."

"We are instinctly blind to what is not relative."

"There are moments in our lives...when we seem to see beyond the usual - become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality."

"A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it always was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods."

"The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say don't run with crowds."

"The individual passes, living his life, and the things he touches receive his kind of impress, and they afterwards bear the trace of his passing. They give evidence of the quality of this growth."

"Don't worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it if you wanted to."

"We have little interest in the material person or the material thing. All our valuation of them is based on the sensations their presence and existence arouse in us."

More later, or you can read the whole thing on Google using the link above.