Thursday Thoughts...

"To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art and fear. Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light". 

David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

"The only voice you need is the voice you already have".

A reminder to me sometimes that I just need to stop and listen to myself, to understand that my voice, which may not be a commercial, successful or marketable voice, is the voice I need to use to make my art.  

Which is different to the voice that sits on your shoulder and gives you a hard time about things - like who do you think you are, and what do you think you are doing?

In different ways and in different places, you come across the idea that your voice or your making is precious and special because nobody else in the whole entire world is going to make what you make, in the way that you make it, with the dreams you have dreamt of it, with what you bring to it, with the spirit you imbue in it and the experiences that have wrought it. Nobody else can make your work and that is the gift you bring to the world.

And as the boys say, that can take courage - to do what you are here to do, and not what others who have gone before or who walk along side, have done or are doing.  In the end, I think I just have to make what I make and do what I do - I have to listen to the voice that is mine, that sees and interprets the world and issues and ideas in this one peculiar way. To do otherwise would not be true.

A quirky little piece from years ago that still makes me smile - called Write me a rainbow...