Status Updates From The Artist's Journey: On Ma...

and as someone whose understanding of life has been shaped by random encounters and small epiphanies, how do i properly acknowledge [...] the professor who counselled the twitching, tortured graduate student to have the courage to leave the confines of academia because he himself had always wanted to be a concert pianist and had spent his life wondering how good he might have been?

feelings come to us - honest feelings, human
feelings, feelings that do not fit inside our square-
cornered life. we want to cry out - from joy, from terror, from grief, from some emotion that wells up and overwhelms us - and we are, for a moment, in a place that has no shape and no edges [...]. this is when we turn to art, because art can give shape to that moment.

this is what a work of art can do. it can make you feel like it sees, like it understands you, like it speaks directly to you and your experience. it pierces the fragile shell of the self, and you feel that on some fundamental level not only do you know that but that work knows you; it comes from a place where your spirit is congruent with the spirit of its creator.

the germans call it einfühlung, or infeeling - a kind of empathy where a work of art resonates with you so deeply and fundamentally that you identify with it spiritually.

i began to breathe ideas rather than think them. thoughts flowed out of me with an ease and grace that had been eluding me for days. i was inside the music and the music was inside me. it was at once a filling and an emptying, a cleansing and an inspiring. by opening my heart the music clarified my mind. this is what music does to me. (...) music for me has always been the mother art.

when you are playing with someone who really has something to say, even though they may be otherwise quite different in style, there's one thing that remains constant. and that is the tension of the experience, that electricity, that kind of feeling that is a lift sort of feeling - john coltrane

you feel distracted, almost disengaged. you have no focus, your mind begins to wander. other artistic projects begin to creep into your thoughts. the work you once wore like a second skin seems somehow distant and uninvolving. you have come to one of the artist's most feared moments: you are done but the work is not finished.

having said all this, knowing when to make the decision remains a leap of faith. but make it your must, because if you fail to make it, you either labour your work to death or never finish anything. neither is a worthy outcome for all the effort you have put into your art.

"But art alone reaches across all boundaries, transcends all language, transcends all time, and in some fundamental way makes us all one because it comes from our common source. No, art cannot stop a bullet or feed the hungry. But it can tell us why we must do these things because it lies at the heart of who we are as humans and reminds us what is common among us."

"one of the greatest mistakes you can make is to focus completely on your art, believing that shutting out the rest of the world is the best way to achieve a clear artistic vision. it is, in fact, quite the opposite. curiosity and openness are perhaps your most important artistic tools."

"[...] you are their personal friend. their feeling of betrayal is great when you show up as someone they do not recognise. you have walked through the door of their heart and said, 'i'm not who you think i am. i am somebody else.'"

"as an artist, there is a great asymmetry between you and your audience. you have laid yourself open before them. you have let them take you into their lives. yer they are in no way a part of yours. you may appreciate them collectively, but you do not know them individually; they, however feel they have a deeply personal relationship with you. they talk about you, they discuss yoou, they call you by your first name."

"all artists know this: the more succes you have, the more the public and those on the financial side of the arts will want you to repeat what you have done before. a painter who wants to change styles is counselled to stay with what works. an actor who has had great success playing a certain type of character is asked again and again to play variations on this same character."

"it was the human drama without parallel. the wealthiest, the poorest; people in a hurry, people with nowhere to go; the desperate, the lonely; wedding parties, thieves running from the police, people having fist fights, couples wanting a dark place to make love - they all got into the cab in the course of an ordinary shift. it was fascinating, exhilarating, terrifying and exhausting."

"either you can take jobs related to you art to keep your heart close to the art you love, but risk dissipating your creative energy in creating works of inconsequence; or you can protect your creative energies by making a living doing something completely unrelated to your art, but risk losing connection with the art in your heart."