Patience, Courage, Honesty

Journal Entry: May 3, 2024

photo: Lilian Bristol - Hedda Sterne in Her Studio with Her Portrait of Joan Mitchell - 1955

At my exhibition opening a couple of weeks ago I met the artist Nathan Terborg who has a podcast and talks with Ty Nathan Clark about artists and being artists. I have listened to a number of the podcasts so far. There is a lot of good stuff to listen to while working in the studio. Recommended. I decided to leave a comment and this is the cleaned up version.

Patience, Courage, Honesty

Response to the Youtube podcast Just Make Art that started with a quote from the painter Hedda Stern:

“To master your vision you have to master your technique. You cannot cheat matter. It shows. You must learn and respect its laws. You are required to use patience, courage and honesty…”

Patience, Courage and Honesty. Patience has a lot to do with just digging in and suspending judgement. Like I say from experience:

'Patience is a virtue that can only be developed once you have run out of it'.

Things take time and when you are at the beginning the view ahead looks daunting so don't look ahead, give yourself permission to take refuge in the present. That's where the courage comes in - to keep going without knowing if you have the staying power to see it through and not enough trail behind you to see where you have been. It all looks so clumsy because you are poking around in the dark. But that means you are about to discover something.

“The best time for learning is when you don’t know what’s happening. If you know what’s happening there is nothing to learn.” composer Philip Glass

This is where the honesty comes in but honesty in this case means following your inner promptings and feeling out the subtle rightness or wrongness of things and of your responses: "No that's wrong, no that doesn't feel right, oops wait, I think that feels better, oh, I like that. what makes that feel right?" You have to spend the many, many hours it takes. You have to reach a state of self-abandon or selflessness where you are not there while you are working like the great quote from John Cage

"When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave." John Cage

You have to make, and make, and make. This is the only way that you can get to a critical mass of micro decisions. Your 'voice' emerges from the thousands and tens of thousands of tiny decisions, tiny lessons learned, tiny problems solved, tiny choices made, tiny revelations and insights that culminate in revealing exactly 'you' over time, your idiosyncrasies, your peculiarities, your inner vision. With enough practice only 'you' can emerge in the end even if you start out as a disciple of someone else.

Without those endless hours in the trenches testing, questioning, experimenting, confronting you can't get to the accumulation of the ten thousand little gems that will make you the veteran you will eventually become. A veteran is a person who has had long service or experience in an occupation. So be patient, take the time, have courage, develop the discipline and listen to your inner truth, your intuitive knowingness which is your self-honesty. Trying to rush it slows you down. Working with the matter and the material will teach you this. They obey the laws of nature and so must you. Everything takes the time it takes. Dig in. Face the battles. Face yourself. Become who you are.