Alex Alvis Art

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist. ~Eric Fischl

©Eric Fischl - Booth #1 Oldenburg’s Sneakers

What does that represent?  There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything.  It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.  ~Fernand Leger

©Fernand Lager - A Vision of the Contemporary City

In the arts there are many right answers.  I've learned over the years that when you get a clue to another possibility to follow it through . . . . Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself.  ~Jerry Uelsmann

©Jerry Uelsmann - Untitled 1987

The trouble with recognizable art is that it excludes too much.  I want my work to include more.  And 'more' also comprises one's doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma of recognizing it.  ~Philip Guston

©Philip Guston - Head and Bottle

So now the floodgates are open to the delight of pure form, whatever its origin.  Anything goes.  ~Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson's Glass House

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.  ~Robert Motherwell

© Robert Motherwell - Black on White

If you make pictures you are bound to be an abstract painter on some level.  ~George D. Green

©George D. Green - Bones

Be guided by feelings alone. . . . Before any site and any objects, abandon yourself to your first impression.  If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.  ~Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot

©Jean-Babtist_Camille Carot - Pâturage dans les marais

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you?  You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water.  Well, I've tried to express just that.  If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest it movement, give a pattern or shape of reality.  I want just the flash of its spirit.  ~Constantin Brancusi

©Constantin Brancusi - The Kiss

genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it.  In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. . . . "Creativity," to rephrase our definitions, "is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

Carl Jung often made the paint that there is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness.  He believed the relationship was compensatory:  consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality.

The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the world, and my vision was given a special clarity.

Kim Jong-un

This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy--the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.

[if we] lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity.  Scientists themselves . . . . have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense.

Franco

Dogmatists of all kinds - scientific, economic, moral, as well as political - are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist.  This is necessarily and inevitably so.  We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems.  For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.