Showing posts with label Louise Bourgeois. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louise Bourgeois. Show all posts
Friday, September 26, 2014
Artist Film Friday
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| Louise Bourgeois photographed by James Hamilton, in 1992, with her piece Arch of Hysteria |
Here is the synopsis of the film from Wikipedia:
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, a 2008 documentary film about artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach and distributed by Zeitgeist Films, chronicles the life and imagination of Paris-born artist Louise Bourgeois. Her process is on full display in this documentary, which features the artist in her studio and with her installations, shedding light on her intentions and inspirations. Throughout the documentary, Bourgeois reveals her life and work to be imbued with her ongoing obsession with the mysteries of childhood. Bourgeois has for six decades been an important and influential figure in the world of modern art. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. She is perhaps best known for her series of massive spider structures that have been installed around the world. Filmed with unprecedented access to the artist between 1993 and 2007, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine is a comprehensive examination of the creative process.
The reason I wish to share this film with you is because there is one point in the film that illustrates very beautifully why artists contribute so much to the world and the people in it.
Artists manifest and share what unhinges our own grief and our own pain and what releases the light of our souls. Even though manifesting these emotions through art is therapy for us, and can be disturbing sometimes, the unhinging of these emotional doors help other people too. Even if certain emotional doors remain locked in you...at least on one side of the door, maybe some light can come in.
Here is a part of the movie I have transcribed for you. Louise is speaking with, I think Amei Wallach. She is sitting at a table in her kitchen and she has a tangerine in her hands. As she is speaking she is drawing on the outside of the tangerine with a sharpie marker and then cutting along those marks through the peel. Here's a visual:
Tangerine - the word is a stimuli for me. If I start drawing a figure on the tangerine little by little the past is going to re-emerge and I will be able to verbalize it. That's it (holding up the tangerine). Now this is not my work of art - it was my father's work of art. Around the end of the dinner on Sunday, he would stand up and take his tangerine and announce he was making a little portrait of his daughter. After drawing it he had a way of cutting it - like so - ...so then you lift up all these shapes that you have drawn and then cut (she demonstrates, peeling back the different peel shapes) the drawing the cutting and the lifting - right. And then when you reach the navel the core would come out. This is the moment you would look inside and the core was fantastic - you would marvel at it right? And you were supposed to marvel at it too; "Look, just look! How impressive." Then he would turn and say "I am sorry that my daughter does not exhibit such beauty because my figure is very rich and obviously my daughter doesn't have very much there - the little creature was just a girl." Maybe the audience never peeped, since they were being fed, they never peeped and maybe - maybe some of them felt sorry for us. But I didn't realize that, I thought at the time that they were laughing at us, that they were not laughing with us, that they were laughing at us. And the pain was very great. (she is trying to keep her composure and must pause from time to time). After fifty years the thing is so vivid it is as if it had happened yesterday. (long pause again) All these children gather up in the night and what can they do except cry and cry in the night? An it is completely useless...what I want to say is that people want to cry in the night...shy do they do so? They don't do it to be clever. They don't do it to disturb the peace. They do it because...it helps them and, since you become very ugly when you yell, you know? . . . .so they cry all night an no body knows why...(she cannot keep her composure any longer in front of the camera and leaves the table and the screen goes dark. The next frames of are one of her exhibits and you hear her voice again), ...I overcame this trauma through a dream. . . .his eyes fell out on the table and the cat jumped up on the table and gobbled up his two eyes. I had achieved my revenge.It is a constant amazement to me that so many people ever survived childhood. Louise had three boys of her own and I don't think she was always easy on them either. At one point in the film she says about parents and children that you come here and you were never promised a rose garden and parents do the best they can.
Hope you are doing the best you can today. I know I am...and I'll be back tomorrow. I think it may be Selling Art Tips Saturday :).
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Inspiration Sunday
I have 10 inspirational quotes from the Artist to Artist book today. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do!
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| 'Amagansett Oct 2002 J Bartlett' oil pastel and pastel on paper |
But it's the physical properties that are paramount - the marks that a person has put down. And those marks have been throughout our history incredibly powerful things....It's that very inappropriateness of art, that it's a shock, that it's something made by human beings and it's not natural, that makes it interesting. ~Jennifer Bartlett 1941-
Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is not art. ~Henri Matisse 1869-1954
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost mothering. ~Marc Chagall 1889-1985
I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood. Anyone who looks at my works must be able to sense that. ~Kathe Kollwitz 1867-1945
The real artist's work is a surprise to himself. ~Robert Henri 1865-1929
The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other man. ~Albert Pinkham Ryder 1847-1917
Imagination makes you see all sorts of things. ~Georgia O'Keefee 1887-1986
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the sense. ~Henry Moore 1898-1986
I go to my studio every day. Some days the work comes easily. Other days nothing happens. Yet on the good days the inspiration is only an accumulation of all the other days, the non-productive ones. ~Beverly Pepper 1924-
Inspiration is indispensable to my work, but it is hard to come by. It is there or it is not - it is a gift of the gods. ~Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010
'Til tomorrow - may the gods gift you with creative ideas and the energy it takes to manifest them today (and every day).
~Alex
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