“As an artist you will experience tension…but in tension comes the possibility of success.” – Greg Wyatt, Sculptor
“The best thing you can do is to keep an art journal; for notes, drawings…record everything because you never know how it will be of use as a source of insight now or when you come back to it in the future. -Greg Wyatt
“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.” – Tyler Knott Gregson
The idea to keep a sketchbook/notebook/quotebook/do-anything book came from a long (amazing!) weekend in the painter Monet’s home of Giverny, where the Marchutz School attended a sculpture workshop with Greg Wyatt. I’ll save my comments about drawing in Monet’s home and Garden for another post, but in our discussions and work with Wyatt we learned some interesting things about what it means to live as an artist, for whom the terms “learner” and “beginner” are necessarily connected. Wyatt is an incredibly successful sculptor- he is the only American sculptor to have work installed in Italy, has a collection of works in the Shakespeare garden in Stratford-Upon-Avon in England, and has one incredible work installed at CofC which I pass every day between classes. And still, much like our professors John and Alan, he assumes the position of a beginner, or rather of a learner, open to possibility, in his approach to his work and creative observation.
Summed up in the quote above he gave us the advice of keeping an art journal- to record in words or in drawings anything that we come across that is interesting or that inspires us. In doing so the objective would be to become absorbed in the process of watching, absorbing, learning, without feeling the need to create anything necessarily finished.
The desire to finish our one-session paintings to show off (rather than focusing on the process of developing my approach over time) has been a problem of mine while I’ve been at Marchutz, and so the idea of having a space to experiment, mess up, play, look, write, think about whatever scene or subject presented itself really appealed to me.
In the past three weeks or so I’ve filled a good portion of this thing with quotes, journal entries, ideas, and lots and lots of drawings. Take a look!
“The best thing you can do is to keep an art journal; for notes, drawings…record everything because you never know how it will be of use as a source of insight now or when you come back to it in the future. -Greg Wyatt
“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.” – Tyler Knott Gregson
The idea to keep a sketchbook/notebook/quotebook/do-anything book came from a long (amazing!) weekend in the painter Monet’s home of Giverny, where the Marchutz School attended a sculpture workshop with Greg Wyatt. I’ll save my comments about drawing in Monet’s home and Garden for another post, but in our discussions and work with Wyatt we learned some interesting things about what it means to live as an artist, for whom the terms “learner” and “beginner” are necessarily connected. Wyatt is an incredibly successful sculptor- he is the only American sculptor to have work installed in Italy, has a collection of works in the Shakespeare garden in Stratford-Upon-Avon in England, and has one incredible work installed at CofC which I pass every day between classes. And still, much like our professors John and Alan, he assumes the position of a beginner, or rather of a learner, open to possibility, in his approach to his work and creative observation.
Summed up in the quote above he gave us the advice of keeping an art journal- to record in words or in drawings anything that we come across that is interesting or that inspires us. In doing so the objective would be to become absorbed in the process of watching, absorbing, learning, without feeling the need to create anything necessarily finished.
The desire to finish our one-session paintings to show off (rather than focusing on the process of developing my approach over time) has been a problem of mine while I’ve been at Marchutz, and so the idea of having a space to experiment, mess up, play, look, write, think about whatever scene or subject presented itself really appealed to me.
In the past three weeks or so I’ve filled a good portion of this thing with quotes, journal entries, ideas, and lots and lots of drawings. Take a look!