"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
Ernest Hemingway
"I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that, because there are not too many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human being ... I want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens ... and to get there I practice, you know I'm a prolific practicer, I still practice every day. You have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you're playing, that's when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days but you want to get to this place where they exist."
Sonny Rollins
The quote from Sonny Rollins (posted on FB by Victoria Webb, a marvelous painter down in Georgia) could have as easily come from Willem de Kooning or a generation later, Richard Diebenkorn. Hemingway in his quote, is writing about the same place but in his style has distilled his process down to a simple, graphic image. The real question facing us all is how can we get to that magic, deep level of spirituality reliably and consistently? Sonny Rollins, a master musician, says practice -
like the old joke, "new comer to NY City asks cabbie, 'How do I get to Carnegie Hall?' The cabbie answers, 'Practice, practice." And it is true that the best way to creative sources lies in a regular, daily practice of one's expressive craft. That daily practice however, is simply kicking the door open to possibilities. One must then enter in and find the state of mind required - and this is perhaps best discovered by attaching the painting process to one's original discovery of the poetry in the subject.
The visual power that speaks to the subject can always be found in the form, the value structure, the space, the color - it is up to the painter to decide how to use them in pursuit of the expressive effect.
This is Hemingway's 'bleeding', for this is always a difficult thing, to penetrate the outward life and obliterate the world's distraction - but possibly the most noble and enhancing of all human endeavor - connecting all of us to a basic human desire; coming to grips with the essence of being alive!
like the old joke, "new comer to NY City asks cabbie, 'How do I get to Carnegie Hall?' The cabbie answers, 'Practice, practice." And it is true that the best way to creative sources lies in a regular, daily practice of one's expressive craft. That daily practice however, is simply kicking the door open to possibilities. One must then enter in and find the state of mind required - and this is perhaps best discovered by attaching the painting process to one's original discovery of the poetry in the subject.
The visual power that speaks to the subject can always be found in the form, the value structure, the space, the color - it is up to the painter to decide how to use them in pursuit of the expressive effect.
This is Hemingway's 'bleeding', for this is always a difficult thing, to penetrate the outward life and obliterate the world's distraction - but possibly the most noble and enhancing of all human endeavor - connecting all of us to a basic human desire; coming to grips with the essence of being alive!
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