All art is a series of recoveries from the first line. The hardest thing to do is put down the first line. But you must. -- Nathan Oliveira
So here is a new blog about art, and here is my first line.
Art is as vital and essential to human life as water, oxygen and food. If all the art vanished, it would mean more than empty museums and galleries. It would mean empty lives.
You don't need to be an artist or an art collector or an art critic to understand this. Look around yourself, wherever you are right now, and subtract, one at a time, every bit of visual art. The paintings on the walls go first, of course, but then there are the walls themselves: who mixed that shade of paint? The windows with their curtains and blinds, what makes them windows instead of raw ragged holes in the wall?
Keep looking, left to right, floor to ceiling, and as you go, mentally obliterate everything shaped by art, by design, by our thousands of human years of sorting out what we can bear to look at and what we cannot, what pleases us and what pains us. Continue until you must stop.
Then go make some art. Start with the first line.
So here is a new blog about art, and here is my first line.
Art is as vital and essential to human life as water, oxygen and food. If all the art vanished, it would mean more than empty museums and galleries. It would mean empty lives.
You don't need to be an artist or an art collector or an art critic to understand this. Look around yourself, wherever you are right now, and subtract, one at a time, every bit of visual art. The paintings on the walls go first, of course, but then there are the walls themselves: who mixed that shade of paint? The windows with their curtains and blinds, what makes them windows instead of raw ragged holes in the wall?
Keep looking, left to right, floor to ceiling, and as you go, mentally obliterate everything shaped by art, by design, by our thousands of human years of sorting out what we can bear to look at and what we cannot, what pleases us and what pains us. Continue until you must stop.
Then go make some art. Start with the first line.
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