Saturday 12 September 2009

Chuck Close on Inspiration

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

I came across the article below a while ago, these aren't my words.


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This is a still frame, only moments before the man's straight razor slices the woman's eyeball, from the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) Directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
My ENG 101 class watched this film today and then we discussed the idea of "meaning." So many of them are still under the impression that there’s such a thing as universal meaning, that there exists a right way and a wrong way to understand something.
Students said stuff like, “It didn’t make any sense.” or “What’s the point?”
As a teacher I’m excited to be the person who introduces them to the idea that there is no such thing as “meaning,” no such thing as “a point.” Just as there is no such thing as right or wrong, no such thing as good or bad - that the only thing which truly exists is our own personal perception of these things, our own personal truth, our own idea of what is good and bad. Not an easy concept to grasp when you’re 18-19 years old and you’ve been programmed by public education, religion, and American capitalism. But I’m impressed with their willingness to grapple with these new ideas. It was an exciting day.


Original Article Here: http://brightstupidconfetti.blogspot.com/2006/01/this-is-still-frame-only-moments.html

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