An Authentic Artist

Louise Nevelson

If there have been complications

in my life,

the work was not

the complication;

the complication was

the world and its blindness

As artists, if we could always live and create with that phrase rumbling about in our minds, we would stop judging our efforts and begin to allow the flow of creativity to course through our bodies and express itself onto the surface of our choosing.

I recently bought three books which I hope will help me mature my creative vision:

 Nevelson, The way I think is collage;  

The Art of Collage, Contemporary Collage in Modern Art

Robert Motherwell, Early Collages

So far, I have only been through Nevelson's book which includes more than 30 years of her collages and incredibly fluid sculptures.  The book is scattered with her thoughts, this one particularly resonated with me:

You don't necessarily have to take a pencil or a pen or something and draw. There are many ways. Let's say collage. By using it meant that it already gives me my drawing. Because the nails and the holes in the nails, and all the different things. What would you say when a car goes over a piece of wood and it comes out with all sorts of things, dents and things in it? Well those are drawings. It is much more direct, doing it the way I do it, it's immediate, it's true and it's there.

Nevelson was born in Russia in 1899 and passed in 1988 in New York. She left a legacy for us to learn from.