artists life

May 10, 2017

I spent most of the time talking around the fact that I had no idea what to do with my life. At one point, he stopped me. “I think that the next step, for you, is to call yourself an artist, and to understand that you are an artist,” he said. “Stop fussing about it and just decide to be an artist. Everything will follow from there.”

As much as I was obsessed with writing and music, I thought actual artists lived far away from the practical world, in some realm I’d never escape to. Simon’s pronouncement had an almost magical effect on me. I slowly became braver in trying that word on, and my work got better.

WILL SHEFF, NYTimes, Feb. 5, 2017 (via ellenkushner)

May 10, 2017

“The artist’s vision is not something that exists, that you know. If you know it and you keep doing what you know, it becomes a familiar road over which you travel until it ceases to be interesting. Instead, with every step toward the vision, questions arise and you pursue those questions. And all the while you’re in the studio, trying to make paintings.” – Brice Marden, Cold Mountain

May 10, 2017

“To be an artist is not about making individual works. To be an artist is to do your work and let your work express the evolution of a vision. It’s a continuous process for which there is never any full, unqualified reward. You don’t get something done and say, ‘oh, that’s it.’ You get something done and it’s part of a living situation. It isn’t a matter of getting something done, and then getting a number of somethings done, and then making an exhibition and selling the somethings. That’s what happens outside the studio (…)” – Brice Marden, Cold Mountain

May 7, 2017

“Success happens in all sorts of ways. There’s sensational success. There’s youth success. And there’s the lifetime success of an artist keeping going, against hell and high water.” – Phyllida Barlow