Alex Alvis Art

Inspiration Sunday

Welcome to another Inspiration Sunday, the first Sunday in November.  If you are in the U.S. (I think Arizona does not do daylight savings time...) did you remember to turn your clocks back last night? 

"I believe in listening to cycles.  I listen by not forcing.  If I am in a dead working period, I wait, though these periods are hard to deal with.  I'll be content if I get started again..."   ~Lee Krasner

©Lee Crasner - Gaea

"I love making art...It's largely how I see myself.  I'm an artist, therefore I have to make art."   ~Chuck Close

Courtesy Sienna Shields © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery

"I'll take weeks out doing drawings, watercolor studies, I may never use.  I'll throw them in a backroom, never look at them again or drop them on the floor and walk over them.  But I feel that the communion that has seeped into the subconscious will eventually come out in the final picture."  ~Andrew Wyeth

©Andrew Wyeth - Young Bull

"Here I am...happy, completely happy.  I have had a wonderful day of painting.  It is not that I have accomplished anything in particular, but it's the thought of all I could do that makes me almost crazy with joy."  ~Paula Modersohn-Becker

©Paula Modersohn-Becker - A Sitzendes Maedchen mit Verschraenkten Armen (A Sitting Maiden with Crossed Arms)

"I paint my own reality.  I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration."  ~Frida Kahlo

©Frida Kahlo - Roots

"To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits:  logic and common sense will only interfere.  But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream."  ~Giorgio De Chirico

©Giorgio De Chirico - Metaphysical Interior with Sun which Dies

"The minute I sat in front of a canvas, I was happy.  Because it was a world, and I could do as I like in it."  ~Alice Neel

©Alice Neel - Elenka

"I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself."  ~Georgia O'Keefe

©Georgia O-Keefe - Rust Red Hills

"Art is the opposite of nature.  A work of art can come only from the interior of man."  ~Edvard Munch

©Edvard Munch - Shore With Red House

"First and foremost, artists should give up self pity and do their work.  Despair and fear of failure must be fought against as the enemies of creativity."  ~Donna Marxer

©Donna Marxer - Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue

Hope this helps inspire you to work like crazy this next week without regard for anything other than what is in your heart.  Wishing you a very creatively blessed Sunday today and since tomorrow is Monday I may have time to blog...but I may not.  Whichever is the case I wish you a good day tomorrow too!

~Alex

Inspiration Sunday

Hope you are having a very artful Sunday...no not awful...ARTful.  :)

It's Inspiration Sunday - and your quotes from the Artist to Artist book are from the sections on Seeing and Perception and Solitude:

A painter should be a solitary.  Solitude is essential to his art.  Alone you belong to yourself only; with even on other person you are only half yourself, and you will be less and less yourself in proportion to the number of companions. ~ Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519

Leonardo da Vinci - Lady With An Ermine

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see.  ~Edgar Degas 1834-1917

Edgar Degas - Dancers in Pink

I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotions reveal to him the hidden truths beneath appearances . . . his eye grafted on his heart reads deeply into the bosom of Nature.  That is why the artist has only to trust his eyes.  ~Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

Auguste Rodin - The Three Shades

Try to reduce everything you wee to the utmost simplicity.  That is, let nothing but the things which are of the utmost importance to you have any place . . . there are lots of clever people who can paint 'anything,' but lacking the seeing power, paint nothing worth while . . . . Seeing is not such an easy thing as it is supposed to be.  ~Robert Henri 1865-1929

Robert Henri - Spanish Landscape (1902)

I work alone (I haven't ever found a way of working other than in considerable privacy), and I go to quite considerable lengths to insure that. . . . I don't find it possible to lose myself in the activity if there are other people around.  ~Reg Butler 1913-1981

Reg Butler - Manipulator

Art, to me, is seeing.  I think you have got to use your eyes as well as your emotions, and one without the other just doesn't work.  ~Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

Andrew Wyeth - Winter 1946

I realized also that the artist is always alone.  Early in life I had thought I needed other people to confirm or approve what I was doing. . . .  It was important for me to learn that what I wanted was really no different from what other artists wanted:  confidence that I could be my own censor, my own audience, my own competition.  ~Beverly Pepper 1924-

Beverly Pepper-Parc de l'Estació del Nord, Barcelona

Sometimes I see it and then paint it.  Other times I paint it and then see it.  ~Jasper Johns 1930-

Jasper Johns - Zero Through Nine (1961)

Actually you see things differently all the time depending on the light, the nature of the day, the way your eyes are focused, the mood you are in.  Your focus keeps changing. f Your head is always moving.  All these things are happening and it is all changing your perception.  ~Janet Fish 1938-

Janet Fish - Black Bowl Red Scarf (2007)

You see, it takes me forever to do a painting, and for that you need peace and quiet. . . .  ~Catherine Murphy 1946-

Catherine Murphy - Persimmon (1991)

Tomorrow we will go back to talking about the women artists featured in the film !Women Art Revolution.

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex