alex sewed flowers onto an old photo he took of me.
Thermal by Louise Richardson (mixed media, dandelion)
"...to trust the world enough to express oneself directly in it..."
1. Art requires time — there’s a reason it’s called a studio practice. Contrary to popular belief, moving to Bushwick, Brooklyn, this summer does not make you an artist. If in order to do this you have to share a space with five roommates and wait on tables, you will probably not make much art. What worked for me was spending five years building a body of work in a city where it was cheapest for me to live, and that allowed me the precious time and space I needed after grad school.
2. Learn to write well and get into the habit of systematically applying for every grant you can find. If you don’t get it, keep applying. I lived from grant money for four years when I first graduated.
3. Nobody reads artist’s statements. Learn to tell an interesting story about your work that people can relate to on a personal level.
4. Not every project will survive. Purge regularly, destroying is intimately connected to creating. This will save you time.
5. Edit privately. As much as I believe in stumbling, I also think nobody else needs to watch you do it.
6. When people say your work is good do two things. First, don’t believe them. Second, ask them, “Why”? If they can convince you of why they think your work is good, accept the compliment. If they can’t convince you (and most people can’t) dismiss it as superficial and recognize that most bad consensus is made by people simply repeating that they “like” something.
7. Don’t ever feel like you have to give anything up in order to be an artist. I had babies and made art and traveled and still have a million things I’d like to do.
8. You don’t need a lot of friends or curators or patrons or a huge following, just a few that really believe in you.
9. Remind yourself to be gracious to everyone, whether they can help you or not. It will draw people to you over and over again and help build trust in professional relationships.
10. And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you’re going through family troubles, when you’re heartbroken, when you’re frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career.
Jongsook Kim
Utopia 10, 2012
Mixed Media on canvas, made with Swarovski’s cut crystals
51 ¼ x 64 in (130.2 x 162.6 cm)
me: what a lovely day! even the flowers are singing!
flowers (singing): the sins of our forefathers bind us to the dirt
“He dreams of white lilies, an olive branch, her breasts in evening blossom. He dreams of a bird, he tells me, of lemon flowers.”
— Mahmoud Darwish.
(via nowinexile)
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.
One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.
Persephone
was used to death. Now over and over
her mother hauls her out again—You must ask yourself:
are the flowers real? IfPersephone “returns” there will be
one of two reasons:either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction—I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?And he would say,
in a short time you will be here again.
And in the time betweenyou will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.
One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.
Dear God, let me be something terrible,
jagged rocks by the sea and salt swallow. Something
made of bulldozers and a thousand spit of outburst.
I won’t blame anyone for my hands, I promise,
not even my mother. When I was inside her
I was beautiful. When I was inside her I was a heartbeat
thinking I don’t want to be anything else. Why did
you have to make me something else? Here’s a photo
of a great white shark feeding on flesh. Here’s a landslide
swallowing a forest. Time travel back into time
and space, here’s the big bang. At least, no one
was breathing yet. At least, I didn’t hurt anyone yet.
I’m terrible at being human. I am most selfish,
most frightening, most asteroid. So make me a planet
instead. Make it a thousand light-years away.
Give me storms and I’ll call them by my name.
Give me storms and I’ll become all of them.
Photo doesn’t belong to me rightly goes to Nicole Dollanganger just reposting it because she’s my idol i love her alot !!
