The beauty of art

I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on — and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

From http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/19/mark-rothko-on-art-selden-rodman/

Daily routines of famous writers and artists

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/is_the_key_to_becoming_a_great_writer_having_a_day_job.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/john_updike_william_faulkner_chuck_close_they_didn_t_wait_for_inspiration.html

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work."

This doesn't mean that inspiration doesn't exist, or that some work is not more inspired than others. It merely means that you should work each day regardless of whether you feel the urge to; it is the process of working itself that will give rise to new ideas. And with steady application, you can expect to hit inspired patches from time to time.

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness.

Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another ‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary.  


the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.

I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.

I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night.

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. 

How do artists make money?

I was wondering about this today.
How does a person like Virginia Woolf sit at home and think? Who pays for her food and house?
How did Thoreau make money if he sat in a cabin for 2 years?
What is their source of income?

True artists are a class of their own. They refuse to sell art. They make art which they want to make. They are not driven by the market. When DD was the only channel, I've heard many people say that the theatre people worked in DD. They made amazing stuff. Today with a 100 channels, we have nothing great to offer but saas bahu serials and overdose of bollywood and gossip.
Earlier art was driven by passionate people whose real reason to stay invested was his love for art. Then too there were the average money minded ones, who produced crap but there were many good guys.
Today, the media is driven by "corporates". Their sole reason to invest in a film seems to be money. I am not an authority on these corporate production houses but I can say that with the kind of money pumped in, we don't see that quality coming out. Look at the Tamil industry. So many new, innovative ideas have come at very low budgets. Bollywood is now looking at Kollywood for inspiration. Film makers quip that masses have a certain taste and they are catering to that. I don't know enough abt the chicken and egg issue here. People say crap is made, so we end up seeing crap.

Taking a diversion, what I want to know is, there are all kinds of artists. Some really talented, shy guys. How do they make money? We've heard of so many musicians and actors who died in poverty, which is why probably the current crop charges 20 crores for a movie, so that they can be financially secure towards the end of their life. It takes a hell lot of effort to observe things and make art. Who pays while you're observing? Is art then restricted only to the already rich heirs?


http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelhennessey/2013/04/02/3-keys-to-making-it-as-an-artist-without-starving/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcTYhaA72iY (Paul Klein on How to Succeed as an Artist)

 
http://artbistro.monster.com/careers/articles/5848-how-do-artists-make-money


Look at what Woof says: Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. Woolf notes that women have been kept from writing because of their relative poverty.


Is intellect a prerogative of the rich then? How can one think deep thoughts if his stomach is hungry? What is the effect of money on a true artist? I believe that artists produce art just for art's sake. Not for appreciation, not for money. Either of these, is welcome though. You should produce art just because you feel like doing it. 

Again, I am ending this abruptly. I don't know how artists make money. I want to know about their lives and struggled and the ways in which they stay afloat.

The minority artists who get neglected

DEEPA GANESH
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/in-the-path-of-light/article5083393.ece 

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  Let there be lightPrasanna on his journey back to the roots; (left) a scene from the playPhoto: Murali Kumar K.Let there be lightPrasanna on his journey back to the roots; (left) a scene from the playPhoto: Murali Kumar K.
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Theatre Prasanna, with his new play Mecca Dari, takes a strong position against art that is driven by the intellect. He tells DEEPA GANESH that with diminishing space for hand-made art, it’s a lonely journey for the artisan

In 1984, for the first Festival of India in London, writer-director-activist Prasanna directed Tughlaq . His political forthrightness left the powers that be jittery and decided not to send the play for the festival. Theatre persons from various parts of the country decried the decision. Some even advised Prasanna to meet the concerned and present his case. “I will not make any clarifications to anyone,” Prasanna stood his ground.

During the Emergency, he returned to Karnataka from the National School of Drama and was instrumental in starting ‘Samudaya’ with like-minded thinkers and activists. This strong leftist theatre movement went to remote corners of Karnataka and through street theatre attacked authoritarianism. With his Abhivyakti Abhiyan, he went on Satyagraha, insisting that regional theatre be accorded the status of national theatre.

Prasanna could have easily been a conformist, but he chose not to be, right from the days when he dropped out of his doctoral programme at IIT, Kanpur. Critical of modernity, Prasanna has espoused Gandhian values and thought, and Charaka, a rural handloom women’s collective that he set up 15 years ago in the village of Heggodu is an outcome of his beliefs. Most production practices at Charaka are manual, and the sewing machine is perhaps among the few mechanical interventions here. Again, this is something that Gandhiji approved; he said: “it does not curtail human labour and human dignity.”

Prasanna, who has firmly voiced his faith in rural renewal, and believes that enterprises like Charaka are an antidote to government’s urban-centric policies, is also someone who exercises trust in the artisan who works with his hands. “I am drawn towards hand-driven artistes, and not art that is driven by the intellect,” says Prasanna, setting the stage for his latest theatre work based on Authol Fugard’s celebrated Road to Mecca . “I am disappointed with the way art is present in today’s world. It is so completely market driven and excessive. You find art on condom boxes also! Why are we doing art? Even when I taught theatre at NSD, I knew everyone was looking at Bombay… it’s pointless…,” he fades off.

Prasanna is angered by people who make a case for pure intellect. How can knowledge be separated from intellect? If art is not driven by experience then it is meaningless and dangerous, he argues. “In my early years, I was shaped by modernists. Over the years, I have come to doubt all that I believed then. It was a source of strength, but mistakes also happened.” The play is about a lonely widow, Helen, living in an African village. She finds meaning to her existence and loneliness by making sculptures, and this Prasanna says is also an expression of his loneliness and isolation as well. “I have distanced myself from this hyper active community,” he adds.

Helen makes bizarre-looking folk sculptures with recycled material. The curious thing about them is that they glow in darkness, creating an ethereal world for her. She believes that all her sculptures are on a caravan that is moving towards the east, in search of light. However, to others in the village, these sculptures are grotesque, anti-church and can only be works of someone on the edge of madness. She is abused by the villagers and Helen’s loneliness becomes unbearable. “It’s an important work for me at a personal level – both from the level of the feminist movement and as a work that helps my understanding of an artist. All her issues are handled at the rural level and has a lot of significance. After Maxim Gorky’s Mother I have not seen another woman character that’s so powerful. She is neither intellectually inclined to become a revolutionary, nor a feminist. Her work is her expression.”

This, for Prasanna, is a major contrast to the community of artists who are mere intellectual beings and are obsessive talkers. “They are landing in the cities in hordes. Helen stands alone amidst this chattering community of artistes. She at once becomes a mirror of the situation and in her tragedy is also our tragedy,” explains Prasanna who has been working on women-centric plays for a while now. “Women have interested me as partners in work over the last few years,” he adds. “In the past I could never talk freely to a woman. But the women of Charaka have showered me with so much warmth. They have fortified my conviction, and in a way redeemed me from many things that I was guilty about…,” says a visibly moved Prasanna.

“I have eliminated everything from my mode of theatre. Sets, props everything has been relegated to the background. Only actors matter to me.” Theatre’s a game of falsehood through which one has to move towards truth. Prasanna, through his theatrical practice, wants to help his actors find their route to truth – his as well.