Blog time! :D I am currently sitting on my bed, propped against the wall with my two pillows. The sheets are nice and clean. I just changed them yesterday from the pink set (who said Mme doesn't have a sense of humor?)
Today I had a crepe avec fromage (emmental) et gelato (cioccolato and stracciatella). We had another potluck tonight, too, but I left early. J'ai mal a la tete. Mais, ca va.
Thought I'd post a few lines from some of our class readings that we (or I) have found inspirational or instructional.
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"It is the placement of the shadows and their harmonious rapport upon which depends the luminous effect of the whole."
"One must leave the paper the power to act by itself in order to give birth to the light."
"'Line is the means by which a man accounts for the effect of light on objects, but in nature there are no lines --in nature everything is continuous and whole.'"
"While he was talking, the strange old man touched every part of the painting . . . always to such effect that it seemed a new picture, but a picture steeped in light."
"[The quality without a name] is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions."
"It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature."
"A good picture, which is a faithful equivalent of the dream which has begotten it, should be brought into being like a world. Just as the creation, as we see it, is the result of several creations in which the preceding ones are always completed by the following, so a harmoniously conducted picture consists of a series of pictures superimposed on one another, each new layer conferring greater reality upon the dream, and raising it by one degree towards perfection."
"The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning. . .".
"In fiction two and two is always more than four."
"You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will."
"The old man sniffed. 'Good? . . . Yes and no. Your lady is assembled nicely enough, but she's not alive. You people think you've done it all once you've drawn a body correctly and put everything where it belongs, according to the laws of anatomy! You fill in your outline with flesh tones mixed in advance on your palette, carefully keeping one side darker than the other, and because you glance now and then at a naked woman standing on a table, you think you're copying nature--you call yourselves painters and suppose you've stolen God's secrets! . . . Brr! A man's not a great poet just because he knows a little grammar and doesn't violate usage!'"
"'It's not the mission of art to copy nature, but to express it! Remember, artists aren't just imitators, they're poets!'"
"'It's our task to seize the physiognomy, the spirit, the soul of our models, whether objects or living beings!'"
"'In Raphael's figures, Form is what it is in all of us: an intermediary for the communication of ideas and sensations, a vast poetry! Each figure is a world, a portrait whose model has appeared in a sublime vision. . .".
"The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference betwen health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction."
"'The right art,' cried the Master, 'is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinantly you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed. . .. What stands in your way is a much too wilful will. You think what you do not do yourself does not happen.'"
"By letting go of yourself . . . that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension."
"The first law of art is sacrifice."
"'You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones.'"
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