YES

"The truth is this, ART in all its forms including writing, poetry, sculpture, painting, music, design, photographing, and more is an accumulation of knowledge. Each painting, novel, poem or photograph is the embodiment of the artist’s lifelong experiences, emotions, education, and intuition. For me, how long did it take, can be easily encapsulated, calculated and condensed into a simple answer… This is what I say, “A lifetime, this painting took a lifetime to paint.”
~Lori"

(From http://www.finearttips.com/2011/11/how-long-did-it-take-to-paint-that/)

New painting

Title: Thou Shalt See My Scars
Year: 2011
Dimensions: Approx. 16 in. X 25 in.
Media: Acrylic, permanent marker, and wire on canvas.

When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.
~ Rabindranath Tagore



(detail)


(detail)

Quote of the Day

We need to make books cool again.  If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them.  

-- John Waters

Couldn't have said it better myself. If I owned my own bookstore, I'd have this printed on a poster, on prominent display.

To suffer

Stolen from a friend's Facebook post:

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

- Woody Allen

Yes

"I knew by the time I was a teenager that I was going to be an artist. There was no doubt about that. There was nothing else for me to be."

-- Mike Kelley

Ebb and flow

A bit of wisdom passed along to me from a friend; it's something I think I really needed to hear today. (Thank you, Jubi.)

"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet, this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity in freedom. The only real security is not owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now. For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. Once must accept the serenity of the winged life, ebb and flow, of intermittency."

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"If your body were hurting, people would send you flowers, but if your mind is hurting they throw bricks."

- Richard Berendzen, 'Come Here'
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Quote of the Day

"I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds."

-- George Carlin (genius)
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"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."

(attr. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta)

I feel like the floor of a taxi cab.

- Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters

Yeah, that.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

- Aldous Huxley

Quote of the day

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-- PJ O'Rourke

(Thanks to C.O. / J.G. for introducing this one to me.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Once they were men. Now they are land crabs."

(from the immortal classic film, 'Attack of the Crab Monsters')

Quote o' the Day

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

- Charles Mackay

Growth

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”

—Anais Nin

Music

"One good thing about music
When it hits you feel no pain
So hit me with music..."

- Bob Marley, "Trenchtown Rock"

Quote of the day

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

- C. P. Snow

Quote of the day

"Censorship is telling a man he can't eat steak because a baby can't chew it."

-- Mark Twain

Time

"...All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

-- Gandalf

(geeky quote, but very sage advice nonetheless.)

Paralyzed

"You do not know how paralyzing that staring at a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can't do anything."

- Vincent Van Gogh, Letter #378 (to his brother Theo), October 1884