It’s fun to compare them. (I have big ponds and little ones.)
Art Quote du Jour
L’art ne s’élargit pas, il se resume. — Degas
(Art doesn’t enlarge, it recapitulates.)
My “Degas” above.
Carefree corollary to the previous post
Work hard, but remembering:
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
You must play too. Combine them and you’re half way down the road to being Leonardo da Vinci.
you gotta work for a living
If you work hard on a painting that will not of itself make it into “art.” Great works of art are not, as I think it was Corot who said it, the products of an infinitude of labor. And if he’s right, hard work alone won’t do it.
Yet though “art” be this “je ne sais quoi” thing yet sheer hard work does take you a long ways toward the goal, for it builds skill, gradually more sure, graceful and resolute skill, which one fine day lends assistance to “art.” Perhaps. If some morning after eating your bowl of Wheaties, breakfast of champions, you discover inside yourself a great idea rich in beauty and filled to the brim with brilliant insight — well then you have the tools, you see, to wrestle that idea to the ground.
It works something like that. Skill is not “it” but a way of meeting “it” someday.
But in the by and by, if you work hard at art …. Well, let’s say you just make yourself work as hard as you can. You pursue the “infinite” labor on a smallish territory in the space-time and turn yourself into the absolute devotee of whatever it is, say, a pear in a basket on a table covered by a red cloth. If you pour yourself into that image, even if it lacks the gravitas of the entire Italian Reniassance, it will come to possess largish chunks of your thought and desire. And that, my friend, we can say without immodesty will hold some fascination.
For, recall, we do not make ourselves. We find ourselves at least partly assembled. We are products of Nature. We can delve into the vast interiors of our own woodlands, or craggy precipices or vast seas or slender streams and quiet lakes or little mud puddles and make discovery. Not on a scale with Christopher Columbus or Magellan, perhaps, but not shabby either.
The human’s humane territory holds beauty in particularity. I learned this redrawing things. No two drawings are ever quite alike, though I swore I’d be a Xerox machine. And no two koi have exactly the same spots nor snowflakes the same …. Of course, you already knew this, right?
So yes, you know but it’s more a matter of daring do. Self expression by itself flirts with narcissism, but self expression with hard work tends toward discovery. Authentic discovery (of continents unknown).
Work hard, therefore, and dig assiduously for there’s gold in them thar hills.
(“Je ne veux plus voir que mon coin et le creuser pieusement,” said Degas.)
fish like food
fish like food
but are like emblems/ as symbols or digits of encryption/ for bold vigor, a shimmering shiny idea/ such swift action, delicacy, grace, gregarious garrulousness or volubility
you could draw the folds of the bed covers and find ripples and waves that resemble currents in water/ and the dreams of your sleep move like the fish/ at the bed’s edge you peer forward to see better, they swim into your angle of vision/ a glimpse is just a fragment/ the whole pond holds all the fish
the fish swim in and out as fleeting thought do/ hold the attention a moment then dissove from sight/ folds away into another narrative
thoughts that dart, dive, are gone/continue swimming somewhere below the surface/ felt pushing heavy curtains of gravity forward/ forward only alas
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