Success: Alone Time

“It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious… he must once more sink himself in solitude.” Edgar Degas

 

“Art starts alone – and convinces society later.”  Douglas Davis 

 

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”  Wolfgang Mozart 

 

“The artist must actively cultivate that state which most people avoid: the state of being alone.” James Baldwin  

 

“I am aware of connectiveness, it is impossible to be isolated completely, but my interest is in solely finding my own way. I don’t mind being miles away from everybody else.”  Eva Hesse 

 

“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”  Albert Einstein

“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.” Thomas Edison

“Great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.” Sigmund Freud

“Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.” Joseph Roux

“One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.” Carl Sandburg

“Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.” Thomas Browne 

“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself.” Leonardo da Vinci 

“Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” Oscar Wilde

 “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for contructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”  Rollo May

“The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.” Eugene Delecroix

“If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.” Samuel Johnson

“My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.” Claude Monet

“A career is born in public – talent in privacy.” Marilyn Monroe

Further Observation

“Isolation can lead to uniqueness, but uniqueness also walks the halls of mental institutions.” Winston Seeney

Inspiration is for Amateurs

“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.” –Chuck Close, artist

 

Beneath the Ink: Peter Arno

The late, great cartoonist of New Yorker Magazine fame, describes his process for getting it right.

 

“It’s a long tough grind, with endless penciling, erasing, rectifying, to recapture the effect and mood produced in the original rough. This penciling is the invisible framework that’s later erased so the viewer will never suspect it was there -the labor and sweat which enable it to look as if no labor or sweat had been spent on it…

Sometimes this pencil layout won’t come right, no matter how I wrestle with it. It lacks life and movement it should have. When this happens I start all over again on a new piece of gleaming white board. Sometimes I make five or six beginnings, reworking faces and postures, striving for the exact comic quality the idea calls for…But finally I think I’ve hit it, and am ready to continue…

Now you -let’s suppose, here, that you’re the artist -you dip a fine pointed sable brush into India ink and start laying in the heavy black strokes that will be the skeleton of your drawing. You keep the line rough, jagged, spontaneous-looking. That’s your god (or mine): spontaneity. You move fast, with immense nervous tension, encouraging the accidentals that will add flavor to the finished drawing…

When the ink is dry, if it still looks right to you, you start that awfullest of chores, the erasing of the maze of penciling that lies beneath the ink, till nothing is left on the board but crisp, clean black-and-white.”

from The Comic World’s of Peter Arno, William Stieg, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, 2005,

Johns Hopkins University Press