On losing friends

Flower by Myong Stebbins

It can be hurtful to lose people, but people who won’t even consider the possibility that their behavior is disrespectful are really impossible. 

— Miep Rowan O’Brien

Quote of the Day: Human Behavior

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

J.D. Salinger

Quote of the Day: Do Not Apologize for Living

Quilt by Linda Beach. Source

Do not apologise for living. The rest of the world can tell you that your life is not important enough to talk about. It is. And it’s how women become collective.

— The Amazing Kim, from this post at I Blame the Patriarchy

Quote of the Day: Got a clue?

Another Time by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.  Source

The first person to get annoyed isn’t necessarily the one who’s wrong; sometimes it’s just the one who’s got a clue.

– Commenter Valerie, from this blog post full of epic comments.

Quote of the Day: What doesn’t work

We learn just as much if not more about what works from what doesn’t work. We see what we never want to be, or what we never want to do. The things we love show us a bar to set.

— Ottabelle from this discussion

This is especially relevant to me right now, because over the weekend I was unexpectedly confronted with something that bothered me very much on an ethical level, and I’ve been turning over in my mind whether to write about it or not. If I confront the issue,  I run the risk of alienating some people, even friends. If I don’t confront it, I run the risk of alienating myself.

Integrity, as they say, lies in being true to yourself.  So I guess I have one more blog post on the back burner now.

Painting I am working on. Temporary title: Cyan

P.S. : LOL.

Art Travel Quote of the Day: Intolerable beauty by Silvia Baker

The bright green weeds, trailing olive roots in the turquoise-blue water, made a pattern like a Japanese brocade.  I gaze and gaze, and feel troubled by this intolerable beauty.  It seems to make demands on me.

– Silvia Baker, Alone and Loitering: Pages from a Artist’s Travel Diary(1938-1944)

Nightfall on Wular Lake, by Col. H.H. Hart

Baker was describing Wular Lake in Kashmir, India.  You can find more vintage artist renderings of the lake here.

Art Quote of the Day: Bill Jensen

I’ve always thought, you can not teach the art part of art, you can’t do it because you can’t even talk about it. So one way of guiding young artists is to just surround them with intense art, deep art, meaningful art, from the past, from contemporary times, whatever it is, from films, from books, from anywhere.

— Bill Jensen

This quote (and the following photo) comes from an excellent piece in the Brooklyn Rail about abstract expressionist painter Bill Jensen.

Here’s another intriguing quote from Jensen:  “A very important concept in Chinese paintings is emptiness and fullness. With my work I don’t know if darkness is empty or lightness is empty. It could also be that either darkness or lightness is full, because in Chinese philosophy, emptiness is not what we think of as emptiness. It is the place where everything will be going and then will be reborn. “

  Read the whole piece here.

Mandate of Heaven, by Bill Jensen. Oil on linen, triptych, 2010-11.

From my notes: Abrasion

Abrasion. My painting. 2011.

Life is abrasive.

I think of new ways to turn myself, so I keep my point and don’t get worn down to a nub.