Eric Maisel Quotes
-
Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.
-
The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.
-
An artist who is too self-centered is liable to exhibit faults he abhors: carelessness, callousness, and even downright cruelty.
-
No muse shoots darts of insight into the unsuspecting artist.
-
The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half.
-
The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.
-
You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.
-
You can't plan in advance for everything - every mood swing, every mistake you might make in execution, every shift in your circumstances. But you can keep updating your plan.
-
Remind yourself of the value of detaching from work that's out of your hands and committing to new work that wants to be born.
-
The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.
-
Creativity is the marriage humanity makes with eternity.
-
Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.
-
Settle into mystery as you would settle into your most comfortable chair. Listen. Have visions. Lose yourself.
-
The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing - or heart, mind, and hands - or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.
-
Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.
-
The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.
-
There are an infinite number of rewards you could bestow on yourself for working at your creative projects, and you deserve every one of them.
-
The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another... is not attending to what the world considers important.
-
The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.
-
The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.
-
A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.
-
Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?
-
If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.
-
The wise artist makes peace with the fact that he will understand less than he had anticipated.