Peony

“And when the work is going well, why on earth would we want to know? Most of the myriad of steps that go into making a piece (or a year’s worth of pieces) go on below the level of conscious thought, engaging unarticulated beliefs and assumptions about what artmaking is...We rarely think about how or why we do such things — we just do them. Changing the pattern of outcome in your work means first identifying things about your approach that are as automatic as wedging the clay, as subtle as releasing the arrow from the bow.

...We use predictable work habits to get us into the studio and into our materials; we use recurrent bits of form as starting points for making specific pieces.

....The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons...any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.
....The private details of artmaking are utterly uninteresting to audiences (and frequently to teachers), perhaps because they’re almost never visible — or even knowable — from examining the finished work.

....The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over — and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns. Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“It’s easier to paint in the angel’s feet to another’s master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself...Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Sometimes it bothered him, pouncing on a fat two-horn and thinking that this same animal might easily have been one of his pets—sometimes he even had trouble at first nerving himself up to a kill. But then the herd would run, and instinct would take over, and before he knew it he had a mouthful of sweet, tender flesh. Sometimes instinct was awfully hard to fight. The mere sight of a herd-beast running away was enough to set Keman’s tail twitching with anticipation and make him ready to pounce on anything else that moved.”
― Mercedes Lackey, The Elvenbane

“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker....As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand — yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion — to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place...they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles “appropriated” from other places and times.

A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear