1.  One difference between art and magic is that magic can be explained.  Were he willing, Houdini could have told his fans how he escaped from the chains and straitjacket, suspended under water.  But the artist can never fully account for the alchemical process that turns anatomical knowledge and fresco technique into the Sistine Chapel.  To create anything is to undergo the humbling and strange experience – like a mystical visitation or spirit possession – of making something and not knowing where it comes from.

Francine Prose, from The Lives of the Muses


2.People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life…I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experience on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell, courtesy of Danielle Shelley

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3…

The underside of the leaf,

cool in the shadow

sublimely unemphatic…

Smiling of innocence, the frail stem

quivering in light

bend and break in silence

This poem, like the painting, is not really about nature.

It is not what is seen, it is what is known

forever in the mind.

Agnes Martin, from The Untroubled Mind


4.   In the first moment of seeing something or hearing a sound – and more so if it is unfamiliar – before the mind names or interprets what you see or hear, there is usually a gap of alert attention in which the perception occurs.  That is the inner space.  Its duration differs from person to person.  It is easy to miss because in many people those spaces are extremely short, perhaps only a second or less.

This is what happens: A new sight or sound arises, and in the first moment of perception, there is a brief cessation in the habitual stream of thinking.  Consciousness is diverted away from thought because it is required for sense perception.  A very unusual sight or sound may leave you “speechless” – even inside, that is to say, bring about a longer gap.

The frequency and duration of those spaces determine your ability to enjoy life, to feel an inner connectedness….

Eckhart Tolle, from A New Earth


5.  Painting is not making paintings: it is a development of awareness.  And with this developing awareness your work changes.

Agnes Martin

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6.  Critics who find non-objectivity anti-traditional, do not see that tradition is a process.  It leads to non-objectivity like this: first, acceptance of nature as including the artist, who is, like one of the details of his painting, an equal part of creation; next, a questioning of what things are, of what we see; then a questioning of how we see; from here to a consideration of vision itself; then to the one who sees, the artist as part of a duality of nature and recipient; to the artist in introspection, and a denial of objectivity.

Fairfield Porter

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7.  What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.   It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration…. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away.  These are our few live seasons.  Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek