Starhawk Quotes

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper... but as my eye takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness , of fear and pleasure; it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing

I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

The most emotional part is when I go into my studio every day and pretty much never have an idea of what's gonna happen.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

I've worked with collage a lot. And there's this chance thing that happens - you don't always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you've got this thing, and you make it work. It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

I never really know what I'm going to write next until it comes to me. So we'll just have to see what happens.

I choose depending on the way I feel; randomly, in other words. When I haven't done anything for a long time, I always start small, on paper.

Creative thought must always contain a random component.