while on retreat with Kate and Kovido at Karitane

rabbit just released

Lasercut 3mm corten steel. This is it at its worst -within a month or so it’ll look a much nicer rusty colour, eventually turning dark brown.

mandala

how to live

From another rather lovely article by Maria Popova, quoting Dostoyevsky, over at Brain Pickings…

“All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.

[…]

And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.”

mandala (shift)

Picasso on Success

An excerpt from an essay by Maria Popova (published over at Brain Pickings) called ‘Picasso on Success and Why You Should Never Compromise in Creative Work’

 

One of these conversations took place on May 3, 1944. Though Brassaï was by then a successful commercial photographer — the very reputation by which he had entered Picasso’s life — he had dabbled in drawing twenty years prior, and had shown Picasso some of his early art. On that particular spring afternoon, Picasso expressed his admiration for Brassaï’s gift for drawing, insisted that he must have an exhibition, and began probing the photographer about why he had abandoned the pencil. Despite Brassaï’s success as a photographer, Picasso saw the relinquishing of any sort of talent — in this case, drawing — as creative cowardice, as compromising, as selling oneself short of fulfillment. Never one to bite his lip, he gave Brassaï a piece of his mind. While unsolicited, his words ring with timeless advice to all struggling artists on the importance of long-run perseverance and faith in one’s sense of purpose:

When you have something to say, to express, any submission becomes unbearable in the long run. One must have the courage of one’s vocation and the courage to make a living from one’s vocation. The “second career” is an illusion! I was often broke too, and I always resisted any temptation to live any other way than from my painting… In the beginning, I did not sell at a high price, but I sold. My drawings, my canvases went. That’s what counts.

When Brassaï protests that few artists are gifted enough to be successful, citing something Matisse had once told him — “You have to be stronger than your gifts to protect them.” — Picasso counters by bringing down the ivory tower and renouncing the myth that “art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.” Unlike those who maintain that commercial success is the enemy of creative integrity — including such well-meaning idealists as Sherwood Anderson — Picasso was sensitive to the layered, dissonant nature of the issue. He understood the fragility of the creative impulse as a serf of the human ego — an ego that thrives, much to our dismay and inner turmoil, on constant positive reinforcement. He tells Brassaï:

Well, success is an important thing! It’s often been said that an artist ought to work for himself, for the “love of art,” that he ought to have contempt for success. Untrue! An artist needs success. And not only to live off it, but especially to produce his body of work. Even a rich painter has to have success. Few people understand anything about art, and not everyone is sensitive to painting. Most judge the world of art by success. Why, then,leave success to “best-selling painters”? Every generation has its own. But where is it written that success must always go to those who cater to the public’s taste? For myself, I wanted to prove that you can have success in spite of everyone, without compromise. Do you know what? It’s the success I had when I was young that became my wall of protection. The blue period, the rose period, they were screens that shielded me.

Picasso translates this ethos of not compromising from the ideological to the pragmatic as he sends Brassaï off with some practical advice on selling his drawings:

Don’t price them too high. What matters is that you sell a large number of them. Your drawings must go out into the world.