Risk taking

Robert Rauschenberg 1955
It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk. (Robert Rauschenberg)

Being happy

encaustic painting crbenda
Henry Miller said, “Paint what you like and die happy.”

Impulses and logic

Portrait of Ari Redon. Odilon Redon. 1898. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Two quote from Odilon Redon:
The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, always pliant, hypnotized by the marvels of nature which he loves, he scrutinizes. His eyes, like his soul, are in perpetual communion with the most fortuitous of phenomena.

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

The Studio

Joan Miro'
I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water. (Joan Miro)

It has been said of Miró that he was an artist who “was born in the 19th century, painted in the 20th century and is the painter of the 21st century”. 01/30/09 - In the year of the 25th anniversary of the death of Joan Miró (1893-1983), an artist committed to the fight for human liberty, Succession Miro has authorised Human Rights Ahead to publish a selection of images of his work to accompany the contents of this website over the course of 2009.
http://www.hrahead.org/News.aspx?id=36

Creative consciousness

benda august 2009


You need to create pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces operate. (Julia Cameron)

Neglected

Garden 2009
" Having a garden, even a neglected garden is still more beautiful than having no garden at all." benda
That being said, art that we do regardless of how we do it, is better than not doing any art at all.
Start on a day, start with five minutes, watch something grow and keep at it.

Accidents

There are many accidents that are nothing but accidents - and forget it. But there are some that were brought about only because you are the person you are... you have the wherewithal, intelligence, and energy to recognize it and do something with it. (Helen Frankenthaler)
Helen Frankenthaler was married to Robert Motherwell

Motherwell

What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between. (Robert Motherwell)

Approval

sacred spaces
ruhl-benda 2008
"The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval in the one issue that really counts-namely, whether or not you're making progress in your work." from the book Art and Fear by James Orland and David Bayles

Satisfaction

benda

I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else. (Paul Cezanne)

Cezanne

Intention

Leonardo da Vinci
"A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul." Leonardo da Vinci

Insight

Richard Pousette-Dart
"In the interest of everyone, the artist has a responsibility to use his medium well. In the Tibetan culture, most of the paintings are of deities or Buddhas, and they try to send a message of the value of the spiritual." Dalai Lama

Richard Pousette-Dart
A first generation abstract expressionist and founding member of what is known as the New York School, Pousette-Dart was the youngest of this loosely-knit group that included modern art titans, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and American transcendental thought, Pousette-Dart never separated his art from his deeply felt sense of the spiritual. http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/3323

Understandng the art

The Bay

There's the artist to her work. The process of creating.
The artist to the viewer. Showing the work. The artist statement
The viewer to the work. Being an audience.
And the viewer to the artist. Exploring a deeper understanding of the artist.

Everyday

benda & benda

Everyday inspiration. wood pile 2009

Beauty

Arthur Dove
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of true art & science. Albert Enstein

The Rut

benda, 2008 Mosaic table top

More often than not, I've found, a rut is the consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don't take into account how you or the world has changed. (Twyla Tharp)

I change up meduims every now and then to get the "feel" of something different.

Discipline

Henry Moore
Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing. (Henry Moore)

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline. (Jamie Wyeth)
Jamie Wyeth

September 1, 2009

Magdalena Abakanowicz
Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind, born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality, in our mind. (Magdalena Abakanowicz)