The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World Quotes

“The most distinctive quality of artmaking is the investment of the artist’s own humanity in the finished piece.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“For those who would make art, the basic proposition is crystal clear: finding the work you are meant to do is the central challenge of artmaking — and making that work is the central challenge of life.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“It seems an almost transcendental quality of the mind that we can even know we see the world differently from others — and more amazing yet that we can share our separate realities with one another. Having spent a lifetime developing one mental map of the world — our own — consider the conceptual leap needed to make that lateral shift into an entirely different framework. Nonetheless, we do it all the time. Embedded within the simple phrase, “What if...?” lay a plurality of worlds.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“Where, then, does your vision of the world reside? What part of your art is drawn from history? What part is prophecy? What part is grounded in fact? What part takes wing in fantasy? These are useful questions. Do you really want to leave it to outsiders and non-artists to make up your answers for you? Many”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“When it comes to making art, our intuition is often light-years ahead of our intellect.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“Several times per heartbeat, over and over from birth to death, we each separate the specific from the general, the figure from the ground, and decide which shape is the mushroom (or the field mouse or the lost contact lens) and which is not. We fit together the pieces that we can, and set aside the rest. The process of being unfolds as an endlessly overlapping succession of most-plausible-pictures. We become who we are by virtue of the choices we make — consciously or otherwise — about which parts belong in our story, and which parts can be left out.” It”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“Art school is a small island of acceptance in a vast sea of disinterest.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World

“A degree in art doesn’t automatically make you an artist any more than lacking a degree precludes you from becoming an artist.”
― Ted Orland, The View From The Studio Door - How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World