Wednesday, April 01, 2009

difficult to take


"If you want art to be like Ovaltine, then clearly some artists are not for you; but art has always struck me most when it was to do with coping with things, often hard things, things that are difficult to take."
- Peter Reading


Image: Peter Reading, Poet by Peter Edwards

4 comments:

  1. The need to cope with hard things is a kind of constraint.
    It turns out that great artists choose to constrain themselves all the time. (for example use only two colors for painting) Innovation comes from constraint. And most of us aren’t smart enough to know what to do with a blank canvas.

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  2. Hi Mariana, thanks for visiting and commenting.

    It's definitely interesting to think about constraint/freedom in terms of artistic practice.

    For me, feeling free from constraint can sometimes allow me to 'make progress'... And sometimes the constraints aren't predetermined, but arise in the act of working through a problem. Sometimes it's a case of 'policy on the run'!

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  3. Txs, I like to think a lot about art, i do it constantly.
    Sorry but I do not get the expression 'policy on the run' (I am not a native speaker).
    Anyway I was thinking today about education of human beings, schools, universities, etc.. and I thought that we need to be thought things, but not to many, cause with some it opens our horizons but with many it makes us to rigid (acquiring knowledge constraints us).
    It is the same with art I think, we need some constraints (indeed it is impossible not to have constrains, we already have a certain physical world that limit's us), but we also need freedom to make our creations(which can be annulled by an excess of constrainys).

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  4. I think along similar lines when it comes to art and constraints. In fact I was going to say more in my previous comment - you've expressed more or less what I was going to say though.

    By 'policy on the run' I meant making up rules as you go, although the expression does have a more specific political meaning.

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