Portraits of an artist
Two fantastic portraits of artist come to my mind.
The first portrait comes from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet
The second comes from Paul Klee’s book, On Modern Art. He compares the artist to a tree. The root is the branching and ordering of a passing stream of image and experience, and the crown of the tree is his art. The artist is the stem, gathering and passing on what comes to him from the depths. “He neither serves nor rules — he transmits.”
I suspect an artist is someone who swings wildly between such strange spectrum, from sensation and obsession to wisdom and wholeness.
March 17th, 2006 at 9:38 am
Bruce Mao’s artist: The Karaoke singer… “always singing someone else’s tune.”
;)
April 1st, 2006 at 2:01 am
Haha! That’s like the modern version of Nietzsche’s artist — getting drunk in a Dionysian Karaoke bar.
“He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances… Man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art.”