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artists writings

The conviction that painting is the right profession grows stronger and stronger in me. Writing is the only other thing I still feel attracted to. -Paul Klee

Henry Moore: Artist’s concerns about the risks of writing

Liabilities associated with writing expressed by sculptor Henry Moore in his own writings (1937). Specifically, he suggests that writing about art and art processes will inherently shift the artist-author social identification from artist to theorist. Of course, despite this concern...
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To write is to organize a relationship. –artist, Marcel Broodthaers

I begin a painting with a series of mistakes…For me the medium of oil painting resists, more strongly than others, content cut off from external relations. It continually threatens, because of its motility and subtlety, to complicate a work beyond the simplicity inherent in a high order of abstraction. I attribute my increasing devotion to oil, lately as against the constructionalism of collage, to a greater involvement in the human world. A shift in one’s human situation entails a shift in one’s technique and subject-matter.
Robert Motherwell, 1947, statement 

A painter who addresses the public not just in order to present his works, but to reveal some of his ideas on the art of painting, exposes himself to several dangers.

Henri Matisse,
Notes of a Painter (1908)

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! Do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: that they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of; but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and (experience) has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Literary Works of Leoiardo da Vinci
JEAN PAUL RICHTER, 2nd Ed. P1i6

Stepping Back to Move Forward: Expressive Writing Promotes Self-Distancing |. Pedagogical Implications for Training those “Moody Artists”

Summary: Park, J., Ayduk, Ö, & Kross, E. (2016). Stepping back to move forward: Expressive writing promotes self-distancing. Emotion, 16(3), 349-364. For individuals high in emotional reactivity with less efficient stress management mechanisms, it seems possible to regulate negative affect...
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Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can find out what is been declassified.

Why is that necessary?
It is a way to keep alert, a kind of sanitation.

Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can protect myself.

From what?
From people’s imagination.

How can you protect yourself with words?
Words ward off oblivion.

Why are you conducting this interview?
It is a way of realizing guilt.

Why are you conducting this interview?
I want to crystalize the daily situation of talking to myself.

Lucas Samaras (AutoInterview 1971)

Lucas Samaras – Why are you making art? So that I can forget my separateness from everything else. Kathy – BUT WHY ARE YOU WRITING?

Kathy–But why are you writing? Does it expose your unseparateness from everything else? Link you to a state of belonging? Or just further acknowledgement of detached states of being? Why are you writing? Why do so many of us, visual...
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Art is not about art. Art is about life…Art will continue, because…it is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporally sane by expressing yourself. All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs that we have. It is about the difficulty of being a self because one is neglected. Art is a way of recognizing oneself…Without fear nothing in the world would ever be done. – Louise Bourgeios (p 167, 173…)

One of my favorite collectors collected white stones, each the size of a pebble and each representing a beautiful moment. These stones had a mysterious value to him and to no one else. Some people collect good luck charms like a penny on the street. Eery time they find one they get titallated.

Is the social worker collecting a collection of saved lives? What about the need to collect friends? What about diaries? My diaries are a form of collecting and they have no use to anybody but me. 

The only saving grace of collecting is its transitional value…hopefully there is a transition from the world of the object to the world of ideas.

–Louise Bourgeios, Artforum, 1994, vol 32.

artists’ writings counter deficits in generation of familial social capital?

Artists + Writing: Deficits in familial social capital provoking compensatory behavior in generating psychological capital in its absence Is expressive writing a counter measure for lacks in real or perceived social deficits? This paper does not set out to answer this question,...
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