7 Dog Days of Summer Inspiration

Every summer I marvel at how incredibly busy my life becomes and were on one hand I wouldn't trade it for the world, on the other hand I just want winter to be here NOW so I can hibernate and relax and languish in art once more.

Perhaps you are feeling the same way.  So I have broken out 7 books from my library to give us all some good thoughts to ride the wave of the remaining months of summer with our sanity somehow in tact.

I am just going to open each book each day to whatever page it opens to and write down the paragraph my finger lands on and the rest of the writing below that paragraph and we'll see what happens.  It may not mean a darn thing to me, but it may mean a whole heaping lot to you.

But first - a photo of a work of art.  Since the book I am opening is The Courage to Create by Rollo May I will do an image search for courageous art and see what comes up. 

Here we go....

Ha ha ha....See there?  This is EXACTLY how I've been feeling these last few weeks!

Ferdinand Hodler-The Courageous Woman

 

Ferdinand Hodler - his paintings are very illustrative and art nouveau surrealistic-ish.  (Take that artspeak!)  I like them.  The woman in this picture has much bigger biceps than I do, but otherwise the similarities are spooky...

 

But I digress.  Rollo May.  Drum roll please....and I'm opening randomly.....ah no.  I don't like that one...something about Stalin.  I'm going in again....ah yes.  Much better.  This is from page 21:

 

"Paul Cezanne strongly believed that he was discovering and painting a new form of space which would radically influence the future of art, yet he was at the same time filled with painful and ever-present doubts.  The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one.  Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.  To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction:  it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.  To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis.  Truth is thus a never-dying process.  We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz:  "I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something."

Paul Cezanne

 

 

Day One is done.  Check out day two tomorrow.  We will be opening a completely different kind of book :)

 

"Till then

 

~Alex