"A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste – it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I'm against."
– Diana Vreeland (1903-1989), French-American magazine editor and fashion journalist
Source: Beata Heuman. Every Room Should Sing. New York: Rizzoli, 2021; p. 38.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 56.
"Our inability and lack of desire to seek fresh imagery means we are surrounded by worn out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. I sense that something dangerous is emerging. Just as a person without memory will struggle to survive in this world, so will someone who lacks images that reflect his inner state."
–– Werner Herzog (b. 1942), German film director, screenwriter, author, and actor
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 93.
"It's not repetition, it's discipline."
–– Mark E. Smith (1957-2018), English singer
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 92.
"What I sometimes find is that if a drawing is going badly, you are blessed. There is no anxiety about messing it up. It needs to be messed up to be rescued. One either tears it into four pieces and then rearranges them, or erases with a cloth. It is kind of relying on a thinking in the material."
–– William Kentridge (b. 1955), South African artist
Source: Lisa Kokin, Instagram, March 23, 2023.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 92.
"Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That's your source of power."
–– Robert Greene (b. 1959), American writer
Source: Daily Philosopher, Instagram, August 17, 2023.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 91.
"An artist's job is to dream the culture forward."
–– Taylor Mac (b. 1973), American performer, singer-songwriter, playwright
Source: Austin Kleon newsletter Friday August 25, 2023.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 88.
"There is no greatness without a little stubbornness. Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity."
–– Albert Camus (1913-1960), French writer and philosopher
Source: Maria Popova Instagram, August 21, 2023.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 88.
"Great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavour."
–– Ray Dalio (b. 1949), American investor and manager
Source: Feel Free Vol. 3, p. 4.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 75.
"Pay attention to the poet. You need him and you know it."
–– Bruce Cockburn (b. 1945), Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
Source: Globe and Mail Letter to the Editor, Saturday September 11, 2021, p. 010.
via: Knapsack Art Alternatives Sketchbook J 2020-2023, p. 18.
"Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out."
–– Henri Matisse (1869-1954), French visual artist
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 74.
"This skillful man ... has to play some written music which is inferior to his own ideas. Nevertheless his superior ideas are the consequences of those inferior ones."
–– unknown theology student, 1741 re: German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
* Bach played "lesser" music to get his brain going and to stimulate ideas he would use for his own improvisation and composition
Source: Range Widely, blog by David Epstein via: Austin Kleon newsletter, June 30, 2023
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 68.
"Nothing, and I mean nothing, is interesting unless it is personal."
–– Billy Baldwin (1903-1983), American Interior Designer
Source: Beata Heuman. Every Room Should Sing. New York: Rizzoli, 2021; p. 13.
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 56.
"Artists: It is only by working that your work can lead you to its own further shores."
–– Jerry Saltz (b. 1951), American author, art critic, journalist
Source: Jerry Saltz, Instagram, April 23, 2023
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 24.
"If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting."
–– Agnes Varda (1928-2019), French artist, film director, photographer and screenwriter
Source: Nitch, Instagram, April 23, 2023
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 23.
"Lying fallow ... allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness."
–– Masud Khan (1924-1989), Pakistani-British psychoanalyst
Source: Maria Popova, The Marginalian, April 11, 2023, Instagram
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 22.
"You have to do work that's meaningful to you, and then you have to keep on doing it."
–– Ann Gillen (b. 1935), American sculptor
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 13.
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."
–– James Baldwin (1924-1987), American writer and activist
"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."
–– Mark Twain (1835-1910), pen name of Samuel Clemens, American writer
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 13.
"The less I needed, the better I felt."
–– Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), German-born, American author
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 8.
"Live your life and forget your age."
–– Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), American writer and minister
via: Sketchbook 33, 2023, p. 6.
"When we are following someone else's pattern, she says, we are mostly stuck in our heads: thinking, counting, reading. When we are figuring out a design for ourselves, we are feeling, asking questions, observing, and making decisions, connecting to the process and the metamorphosis of the work on a deeper level."
–– Renate Hiller, fibre artist and teacher
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. 47.
via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook I 2019-2020, 2020, p. 29.
"... to seek a barer life, closer to reality, without all the things that clutter and fill our lives. I left friends whose preoccupations of me held me to their image of me. ... The truest thing in my life is my work. I want my life to be true. Almost gave up my life for my work, seeking a life of the spirit."
–– Lenore Tawney (1907-2007), American artist. 1967 Journal entry
Source: Judy Martin Modernist Aesthetic blog
via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook I 2019-2020, 2020, p. 32.
"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.
"The editorial cartoonist's task is to emerge from [a] blizzard of information with a coherent and (it is hoped) amusing idea, one that addresses some aspect of the day's events. That good idea requires coaxing, coddling, cajoling. ...
In my case, that coaxing process is based entirely on doodling, which I've done my entire life. ...
At the beginning of each workday, one scribble has led to another, when suddenly, out of the muddled swirl of pencil strokes, the artist's twisted subconscious recognizes the germ of a cartoon idea. It's much closer to alchemy than it is to science."
–– Brian Gable (b. 1949), Canadian editorial cartoonist*
Source: Brian Gable. 'Adieu.' The Globe and Mail, Saturday September 9, 2023, p. O9. *Brian Gable was The Globe and Mail's editorial cartoonist for 35 years. He retired in September 2023.
"The Dalai Lama ... reminds us that the only way to live in a world of constant change is not to pretend that it might be otherwise. We may have little control over external circumstances, but we have a lot of control over how we respond to them, and how much we choose to take loss to be fresh opportunity. [...]
"But the ever-more-visible precariousness of our homes – and the places we love – is telling us, every hour, not to waste a moment or assume that everything will remain the same."
–– Pico Iyer (b. 1957) British-born novelist and essayist
Source: Pico Iyer. 'The Vanishing.' The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 26, 2023, p. O3;
"[The job of art is] to investigate your own experience unsparingly, and make that investigation public so that others can use the evidence in their own private investigations."
–– Marina Endicott (b. 1958), Canadian novelist and short story writer
Source: Marina Endicott. 'The job of art requires us to investigate our own experiences unsparingly.' The Globe and Mail, Saturday September 9, 2023, p. B7.
"Thoughts become things. If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand."
–– Bob Proctor (1934-2022), Canadian self-help author and lecturer
"Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."
–– Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), Egyptian writer and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Negation is creative ... By having less of something more comes into being."
–– Iain McGilchrist (b. 1953), British psychiatrist, writer, lecturer
Source: Austin Kleon September 23, 2023, Instagram
