inspiration

Think different. Be different.

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“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”—Frida Kahlo

One of the first items to greet visitors at Musée National d’art Modern’s elles@centrepompidou exhibition, this display of messages—simultaneously humorous, provocative and all too true—from Guerrilla Girls is the perfect welcome to the thematic show. The exhibit seatures the work, culled from the museum’s collection, of women artists of all disciplines in the 20th and 21st centuries. Elles@centrepompidou runs until February 2011. Luckily, the wonderful antics of Guerrilla Girls, the self-described “conscience of culture,” has no end date. Read all about the “feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger” on their website. [Click on the image above to open larger in a new window and zoom in to read.]

“Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn’t follow anybody!”
—Paul Gauguin

“The function of art is to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”—Anaïs Nin

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”—W. Somerset Maugham

“Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do. With such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”—Vincent van Gogh

“An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all…feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique—all these are in the middle.”—Paul Cézanne

Dressed in familiar traditional garb, a Tibetan Buddhist monk hunched over a square table in the middle of the glass-enclosed atrium of the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, rubbing a metal rod he held in his right hand against the serrated surface of a long, thin metal funnel (called a chak-pur) in his left. As tourists of the historic district’s antebellum mansions entered the conspicuously contemporary structure to escape the sudden summer storm, joining those who intended to attend this event, the monk remained solely focused on task before him, despite the squeaking sneakers, increasingly audible chitchat, and camera flashes. The colored grains of sand flowed like liquid through the chak-pur (a result of the vibrations caused by the metal rod) on to the wooden platform, guided by the monk’s steady hand and concentrating mind.

After nearly 30 hours over several days, the group of lamas from the Drepung Loseling Monastery eventually completed the mandala, a remarkably intricate circular design composed of millions of grains of various colored sand. Once finished, it was destroyed. Read more…

“What art offers is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
—John Updike