wise words

Ok, I'm going to make a goal to blog every Friday. Friday blogger dogger day. Because time is no joke. It wont slow down for anyone. So instead of sharing whats on the easel right now, I'm going to just share an inspirational thought I heard while painting this week. Nothing new. Just a good reminder.

I love film. I really like listening to directors commentaries. The creative process in film-making fascinates me. Bringing together several artistic elements to create a "motion picture". I see a lot of parallels in the language of a film maker and a painter. I could go on and on about that. Anyways, I listen to directors commentaries while I paint. This week I saw the THE RAINMAKER on the 5$ dvd shelf at WallyMart. Typically I probably wouldn't have taken much interest in this film, but the back cover said it had commentary by Francis Ford Coppola. For the sheltered people out there who haven't lived on this planet for the last twenty or thirty years, Coppola directed iconic American films like The Godfather part I, II, and III, Apocolypse Now, American Graffiti, The Outsiders, and many more. He directed most of America's most accomplished actors early in their careers. He's legend.

So, I like this quote from Copolla in his commentary about The Rainmaker, and I think it definitely applies to painting and picture making.

"Being an artist, ultimately what you really have to work with is yourself, and your memories, and things that have some emotional charge to them for you. Other people when they see it, instinctively they can tell what's authentic, what's an authentic thing they are being shown, or what is just some thing maybe for effect. There is a difference between what you share with an audience that comes out of your real life, whether you're a poet, or playwrite, or an actor, or film maker, (or painter). So the artist has to learn how to be available to their own instincts, and their own feelings, and be able to incorporate them in to the story."