]]> http://dailyartmuse.com/2009/11/04/outside-or-inside/feed/ 0 http://dailyartmuse.com/2009/10/14/peter-lu-captures-autumns-splendor/ http://dailyartmuse.com/2009/10/14/peter-lu-captures-autumns-splendor/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:30:19 +0000 Susan Lomuto http://dailyartmuse.com/?p=14382 today’s flickr find:

A vivid jolt of color.  The quote is also grand.

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. ~Stanley Horowitz

Ming chai on Flickr

The cure for boredom is curiosity.  There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker

d.teil on flickr

Every time you judge yourself you break your own heart.

bryanbope on flickr

I make the most of all that comes, and the least of all that goes. Sara Teasdale

nickapo on flickr

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler

Theoda on Flickr

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.  Confucius

Mama Lola Busy Out on Flickr

I see a bird gathering dinner…what do you see?

It’s all out there, floating free, waiting for you to pull it down and anchor it. Ann Bernays

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. Dalai Lama

Looking fear directly in the eye will always cause it to shrink to a manageable size. From Alison Lee’s ‘Entertaining Thoughts’

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent. Dalai Lama

Discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought. Albert Szent-Gy-rgi

My only advice is to spend less time on thinking about success and put all the energy in making art itself. Otherwise your relationship to your art changes. It becomes less genuine and honest. Art should not be born from a pressure of becoming successful but something deeper. This is always a danger and the cause for mediocrity in art. . . .Shirin Neshat

via ArtBizBlog

I often find comfort in Rainer Maria Rilke’s sage advice and simple words. This week brought news of fear, suffering, uncertainty and loss from more than one person in my world. I send a Rilke passage to all, with love. You are in my thoughts.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Inspiration, Originality and Infringement

On permission to call yourself an artist and finding your artistic voice:

Elise Winters: “Take the time to allow yourself to be the student, the trainee. Call yourself an artist NOW – you can be a great artist without feeling like you have to go to a craft show and sell it.”

“You do yourself a disservice when you think you own the work you learn from a master artist. Recognize that it’s not your own. You will know when you’ve found your own voice because when it happens, your heart will soar.”

[EDITED to ADD: You can hear Elise speak in greater depth about the topic with Alison Lee on this Craftcast podcast.]

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On a personal note, Elise’s words resonated with me because I am still learning from the masters and I don’t sell my work and I am waiting for that moment when my heart sings and guess what? I am an artist. The hardest part was giving myself permission to call myself an artist, but I felt liberated when I gave up that struggle.

Have you given yourself permission to call yourself an artist or do you struggle with the title of ‘Artist’? Do you agree that you can be an artist without selling your work or do you think that selling your work justifies the title? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.