Starting today, I will be sharing a series of seasonal notebooks, four a year, each lasting a calendar month and following a single theme. The first notebook is Leaves of Poetry.
writing
“Enjoy yourself as much as you can, have as many diversions as you can, and remember that what people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity. So intensify your own health and strength and life a little; that is the best study.”
Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his youngest sister Wilhelmina (via Mason Currey)
There is also a curious aspect I hadn’t thought of – that of writing facing the front of the house again. Our bedroom faces south, to the back garden – I am now adjacent to the north-facing window looking out onto the front garden. And, suddenly, there is a strange mental shift to being part of our village facing the front rather than the back.
Notebook, Lydia Crow, 7th January 2023
No longer producing work that might suggest an alternative to established tradition, it is at this point that their work is no longer art and they no longer artists. There might be a great degree of craft involved, a great degree of skill involved, but craft, skill, and art are not one and the same. To be an artist is to be revolutionary.
Ganzeer, 22nd December 2022
Students are not fools. They were, after all, once young children who if they reached too close to an open flame might well have gotten a smack on the hand, or a scary lecture about the dangers of third degree burns (skin grafts, my child, unimaginable pain) and never did it again. Decades later they too often apply those same lessons to writing: red ink = bad. Do not do that again. Which, in turn, risks molding a young writer into someone who forsakes creativity into someone whose core skill is avoiding pain.
Writerland Chapter 79: Don’t Be So Mean by Michael Shapiro
Emphasis mine.