Quotes are often used here to illustrate the point of a certain blog post but sometimes a quote is just fun to examine on its own, without a lot of wordiness. I often read a quote this way and it sets me off in all sorts of directions, often away from the central theme of the quote. It can be pretty inspirational in this manner. To that end, I am starting a new weekly feature here on the blog called Quote of the Week. I want to focus on themes that relate to painting and some of the central themes of life.
Hopefully, they will be enlightening or, at the very least, interesting.
I am going to kick it off with one of my favorite quotes from Pablo Picasso. It pretty sums up my own criteria for evaluating art. At the top is one of his greater works, the anti-fascist masterpiece Guernica.
There is no past and future in art. If a work of art cannot always live in the present it must not be considered at all.
–Pablo Picasso
What a great idea. I’m a great lover of quotations, myself. One of my favorite sites is the Quote Investigator, who explores some other quotations from Picasso here. Sometimes I use the site to check the veracity of a quotation, but sometimes I just browse, enjoying the articles.
As for Picasso’s words here, how true they are. What came to mind was a snippet from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” where she reflects on a particular experience of art:
” If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”
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