I like to read about artists that I like, but not what others say about them. Rather I like to begin with how artists understand what they are doing, how they interpret their own processes. Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, and Matisse for example, talked a lot about the subject being a prompt to which they respond. The notion of sensations – both sensations of light and sensations they feel or frissons from the experience – were important to them in explaining what they do.

Below are very brief thumbnail sketches of 8 great artists from different disciplines. I’m interested in their processes, habits, motivations. How do they go about their work?  And what might we learn from their respective approaches?

8 Artists and Their Peculiar Thoughts and Practices

1. This artist is a woman writer. She writes while lying on a made-up bed. She has with her a bottle of sherry, an ashtray, and a bible. She reads the bible to get a sense of rhythm in language. She reads it to make contact with melody so that melody may infuse her mind and body. She says when asked if she had been nervous reading her poem at Clinton’s inauguration, “No. I was inside the poem.” Her name was Maya Angelou.
2. This artist is a male actor. He is taken by the way a child, seemingly possessed, can be captured by a leaf, compelled to look at it for a long time. He says he wants what that child has. And if in his work, he isn’t captured in similar ways, he believes that he’s “in danger of, in some small way, kind of dying.” His name is Gabriel Byrne, nominated for many Tony, Golden Globe, and Emmy awards, and listed as the 17^th best actor in all of Irish history.
3. Our third artist is a musician. He says that “All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.” Thinking about the payoff, he adds, “The real risk is not changing. I have to feel that I’m after something. If I make money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.” His name was John Coltrane.
4. The fourth artist was a male painter. Once, when he was a young man, his friends became concerned when they hadn’t seen him for a month. When he reappeared, he was asked where he had been. His response: “I’ve been walking around looking at clouds.” His name was Renoir.
5. This male artist was a musician. So involved in the process of writing music was he that he often left music he had written scattered about his house, as he would simply move on to the writing of the next piece that interested him. One day, his students gathered up some of the music that he had abandoned, set him down, and performed the music for him. After hearing this music he said, “My that’s lovely. Who wrote it?” His name was Franz Schubert.
6. One male painter’s explanation of how he worked through a painting was not dissimilar to Schubert’s process. While thinking about a work he has just begun, he said “I’m treading very gently….If it were possible, I would leave it as it is….[and carry] it to a more advanced state on another canvas (my emphasis). Then I would do the same thing with that one. There would never be a ‘finished’ canvas, but just the different ‘states’ of a single painting. ….because I am searching for spontaneity, and when I have expressed a thing with a degree of happiness I no longer have the courage to add anything at all….” His name was Picasso.
7. A seventh person, also a painter, revealed a rather odd belief: “People think a sugar bowl has no physiognomy or soul. But…you have to take them, cajole them, those little fellows. These glasses, these dishes, they talk among themselves. They whisper interminable secrets….Fruits…love to have their portraits painted. They…apologize for changing color….They come to you with all their aromas and tell you about the fields that they left….Objects penetrate one another. They never cease to be alive. Do you understand?” His name was Cézanne.
8. Finally, an eighth artist, a woman and a political painter and sculptor who lived through both world wars in Germany. She suffered greatly and her work expressed the suffering of ordinary people. She was quite clear about what it was that was fundamental to her life as an artist: “Where do I stand? I too want to be free of everything that hinders my real self. I want to develop myself, that is to unfold, to pull myself out of the state of suffering and come to a clear sense of my own powers. The process is like a photographic plate which lies in the developer: the picture gradually becomes recognizable and emerges more and more from the mist.” Her name was Kæthe Kollwitz.

The Take-Aways

Many of the things that occur to me when I read about each of these artists is how much their individual approaches link together to form a single approach. No one in this collection of art makers, unlike Warhol, Koons, Hirst, and many contemporary artists, uses the activity of art making to realize some end external to the activity such as private gain, power, or wealth, for example. Instead we find that it is in the process of doing, of articulation, that there is intrinsic value. While the selling of books, music, paintings – that happen along the way – may be a business, the activity of making art clearly is not for them nor can it be.

Let us consider each of the artists separately:

Angelou: She really is her own person. And so are we. Each of us is the only person who has to live our life, of course. Artists – and here we may assume everyone in their work – need a healthy degree of independence, yes; but all of this, especially in the case of Angelou, is in the context of the melody of solidarity.

Byrne: We need to let go of reality we perceive and enter a realm where nature is affective and talking to us. It is useful to see things as a child, open to nature and allow ourselves to be captured and carried away. I agree with Byrne that without the “being captured” by something external to us in the process of work is to die a little in the process.

Coltrane: In our art making we ought not be doing things to achieve a specific result. We don’t know where our art is going when we are in the process of creating it. Striving or growing turns on the creative risk of being who we are.

Renoir: We ought not enter the creative space roiling with intention. At times we need dead space to clear away the list of things we want to accomplish.

Shubert: We need to work under the influence of the moment, getting into the absolute passion for the thing we are doing. That’s the entire payoff.

Picasso: Our work is merely an endless series of attempts, just starting points from which we grow, realizing our power so that we feel larger as we move on to the next beginning.

Cézanne: Our world isn’t fully calculable. There is mystery, agency, and magic often erupting amid the everyday.

Kollwitz: It is not an instance of self-absorption to want to be free of everything that hinders our real self, particularly if such constraints come from social institutions and social mores. All expressive art making in this context, at its most fundamental level, is then a process of becoming –  and resistance.