Art from Your Core Quotes

“Sincerity is frequently written off as an immature stance. Naiveté and earnestness often co-exist, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Naiveté is a simple lack of knowledge and experience. Earnestness is a way of BEING in the world: sometimes by default of innocence, but also as a conscious, informed choice to reject cynicism and live life in an authentic way. To be earnest is to face each day with an open spirit, as opposed to living one's life crouched in an impermeable, defensive posture. For many in our culture, it is a much greater sin to be a gullible idealist than a cruel cynic.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“I think many of us live with this nagging sense that we could go deeper. That there is some elusive "next level" in our work that calls to us, haunts us in our dreams, but remains unarticulated in our practice. I believe that the dreaded "creative block" is not necessarily a lack of ideas, but that you recognize the ideas you ARE having are not what you were BORN to make. You can feel deep in your gut that you are capable of great things, that something wants to come through you, but YOU are blocking your core, the brilliance of your own spirit as it wants to be manifested THROUGH you.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“There is a movement afoot to convince artists that they are simply another type of entrepreneur. On the surface, this is a seemingly harmless and understandable rejection of the starving artist trope. Yet people seem to have forgotten that, since the beginning of recorded history, artists' cultural role went far beyond simply making a product to peddle.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“The cumulative, profound loss that we have collectively experienced would cause any sentient being to become depressed, anxious, and isolated. Yet, instead of rejecting this paradigm to make time for the things that connect us to each other and fill our lives with significance, inertia often wins. It is simply too easy to opt for handy, addictive, second-rate experiences that leave us feeling hollow and hopeless. We are like children with a comforting, nourishing meal within our grasp, yet we gorge ourselves on the candy pile dumped directly in front of us, even as our souls feel increasing nausea with each bite. The saccharine stupor disorients us, so we can no longer even intuit what we need. We just know we feel adrift, with a voracious hunger for something that we cannot name.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Artists fire bullets of truth to pierce the ever-thickening wall of relentless lies.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“It is frightening for me to hear freshman art students talk about "branding," because, know it or not, they represent the last frontier. If the artists give up, there is no one else left. If we throw away our agency, being seduced into a corporate mentality so we can simply make our product to get our piece of the pie, we put another nail in the coffin of art's higher power.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Artists are one the final holdouts. Virtually every profession is being driven towards commodification. And corporations, with their profit-driven standardization, building consensus, obfuscation, and aversion to risk, are the ENEMY of art.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“When working on other commitments, "the work that needs to be made" is relentlessly harassing me, whispering in my ear about what I am SUPPOSED to be creating RIGHT NOW, as it attempts to lure me away, like the Pied Piper.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“We are a sum of our unique, individual life experiences. The trials we have faced, the causes we fight for, the fears that haunt us, the oddities of our minds; all of these and more become the food for our spirit. The universe does not need repetition from the past; another pretty, but pointless reclining nude, sunlit but stale impressionist landscape, or old and cold minimalist cube. It needs YOU. It needs you to strip away all that clouds your genuine sense of self. It needs you to unearth and unabashedly OWN your messy honest, and magnificent truth. And it needs you to deepen and shape that truth into an authentic core, one that will nourish you and your work for a lifetime.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Artistic "style" that does not evolve as a result of a natural process is the embodiment of "fake it till you make it," referring to the way something APPEARS, not the way that it IS. It's a veneer, a hollow afterthought technique hung on the artwork to dress it up... I prefer to think in terms of the artist's VOICE. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. You earn it through research, experimentation, and discovery. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows the gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work's physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else's.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“The arbitrary influences affecting artists' vocabularies are many, and not necessarily all beneficial. The limiting trends of the day, the biting criticism, or the instruction insistent upon getting us to conform against our temperament can affect the work in profound ways, sometimes stalling us for decades.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

“Provocative art can pierce your nervous system, touching arts of you that rhetoric cannot. A charged, layered object can haunt viewers for days, as their unconscious works to unpack it. Art instigates, nudges the conversation along, and ultimately advances civilization.”
― Kate Kretz, Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice