Category: studio table

recurring discussion starter

woodshed

Posted on Posted in creativity, overnight notes, studio table, Theory

continued from: https://webionaire.com/2022/10/25/further-afield/ years ago.

Gatherings of the skilled increases the skill of those at the table. If, and only if… a person’s awareness increases beyond the elements of the work, the components. The gathering is the difference. Sometimes, it provides enough affirmation, supporting you as you gain the skills outside your studio.

1975, “If I can override my depression and worry about money — I am OK because I am fairly secure in my ideas about painting.” AND ” I received by fourth(fifth) Guggenheim rejection today. “

doubts. uncertainty. resolution.
“I REFUSE TO ACCEPT THAT WHICH I DO NOT FEE;. The energy in NY today is all important, not so much the product being produced.”

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.” — proust

[As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann’s Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913]

“Photography suits the temper of this age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. — Edward Weston

Discourses on Art

Posted on Posted in art school, coursenotes, meaning, studio table, Theory

Book by age, or by contents. How do you choose the text for your table? Mine is filled and emptied by whim; by wandering among the stacks. Like a sleepwalker without slippers. Old books are kept not maintained. They become overlaid with marks upon readings. Reynolds is an old text without many current readers. I never spend more than a frew minutes with it, although it draws me in enough times over the years to remain on in the main stacks.

Joshua Reynolds. [1723- 1792]

Further:

Additional ballast from the “other”:

  • The ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH is that there are NO ABSOLUTE TRUTHS (Feyerabend) 
  • I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives … (Jean-François Lyotard)
  • Finally, if nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion. (Aristotle)
  • If anyone thinks nothing is to be known, he does not even know whether that can be known, as he says he knows nothing. (Lucretius)
  • And isn’t it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are. (Plato)

Studio Table: Jul 30 ’25

Posted on Posted in as written, studio table, Theory

Book links… quicknotes of the incoming stack. Keeping myself moving in more than one direction.

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” thomas Mann.

[Mike Csikszentmihalyi called the flow state. In flow, you realize your fullest creative potential. You lose track of time. You’re not distracted by little things around you. Flow is like a drug. Once you’ve experienced it, you want it again. ]

Shelf side

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525206/the-bodhisattvas-brain/? [ In The Bodhisattva’s Brain, Flanagan argues that it is possible to discover in Buddhism a rich, empirically responsible philosophy that could point us to one path of human flourishing.]

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552141/planetary-eating/? [Starting from rather basic (but not quite first) principles, Planetary Eating offers impartial, fact-based analysis with firm foundations in earth and planetary sciences on how to make the right dietary choices.]

[Arendt describes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the “masses” whom totalitarians funneled into a movement were made ready for such mobilization by a “desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture and fake life. . . . Unlike the nihilism of Nietzsche and other radicalisms (Sorel, Bakunin) for them it was about destruction for its own sake: destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.”] in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549042/the-emperors-new-nudity/? [Technology, Kremnitzer writes, leads us toward an impersonal and hyperrational world to such an extent that it renders human subjectivity outmoded. Authority, on the other hand, anchors our subjective identifications to certain figures and seems to be hopelessly primitive and irrational. What is required, then, is a dialectics of the primal]