ON CREATIVITY

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours cleanly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open...No artist is pleased...there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest, that keeps us searching and makes us more alive than the others.”

—Martha Graham
(in conversation with
Agnes de Mille)

“Realistic drawings have always seemed less poignant and interesting to me than the curious searching of a line that records a moment perceived or a notion improvised, a poem of the eye and hand in concert. I prefer less specificity and more mystery: drawings that capture a time and a place while exploring the calligraphy of the imagination as it responds to what is seen (the world within)."

—Chester Arnold (on Richard Diebenkorn)

“Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living—a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving—born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for not acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.

Finally, tradition is creative. Always original, it always opens out new horizons for an old journey. Convention, on the other hand, is completely unoriginal. It is slavish imitation. It is closed in upon itself and leads to complete sterility.

Tradition teaches us how to love, because it develops and expands our powers, and shows us how to give ourselves to the world in which we live, in return for all that we have received from it...”

—Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude

“If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition,’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves in the first place, the historical sense...and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

—T S Eliot, from Tradition and the Individual Talent

ON INFLUENCE

“We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.”

—Karl Popper, philosopher and professor (1902-1994)

“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

“I often think the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.”

—Vincent van Gogh

“I’ve always believed that some amount of optimism, conscious or unconscious, is inherent to the art-making impulse—that to dedicate oneself to something as difficult and thankless as creative work, one has to believe that the world is still good enough and open enough to be transformed, even briefly, by beauty."

—Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker

“I have all my subjects at hand. I go see them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before painting, I think, I dream.”

—Pierre Bonnard