Quotes: Mary Oliver

"Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness – an empathy – was necessary if the attention was to matter." 

–– Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet 

via 2020 Aboveground Art Supplies Knapsack Sketchbook, 2024 p. 44. 

Quotes: Ellen Dissanayake

"My own opinion is that we are neglecting at our peril what neuroscience has revealed are "right hemisphere" functions (paying attention to our surroundings, empathy, intuition, metaphor, emotional expression, aesthetic decisions and appreciation, and so forth – aspects of the arts that we have no words for because the right hemisphere lacks "propositional" or "rational" language). We have made a world that requires "left hemisphere" skills (analysis, detachment, sequential argument) in order to survive."

 –– Ellen Dissanayake, American author, lecturer, independent scholar 

Source: Melanie Falick. Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live. New York: Artisan (a division of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.), 2019; p. 25. 

via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook I 2019-2020, 2020, p. 28.

Quotes: Matt Haig

"Reading isn't important because it helps you get a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action."

–– Matt Haig (b. 1975), English author and journalist 

Source: Art Propelled December 18, 2018.

via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook 2019 g, 2019, p. 2. 

Quotes: Wil S. Hylton

"It seems to me now, with greater reflection, that the value of experiencing another person's art is not merely the work itself, but the opportunity it presents to connect with the interior impulse of another. The arts occupy a vanishing space in modern life: They offer one of the last lingering places to seek out empathy for its own sake, and to the extent that an artist's work is frustrating or difficult or awful, you could say this allows greater opportunity to try to meet it. I am not saying there is no room for discriminating taste and judgement, just that there is also, I think, this other portal through which to experience creative work and to access a different kind of beauty, which might be called communion." 

–– Wil S. Hylton, American journalist 

Source: T: The NY Times Style Magazine via: Sarah Boyts Yoder Instagram, 2016 

via: Sketchbook 29, 2016, p. 73.