Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
Interpretation
Art transforms life experiences into creative expressions. Artists utilize the essence of life to create something new and meaningful.
Audre Lorde emphasizes that art is derived from life but does not equate to it; rather, it is a medium through which artists channel their experiences, emotions, and perspectives. The quote points to the artist's role in taking the vibrancy of living experiences, interpreting them, and crafting artistic expressions that resonate with others, highlighting the transformative power of creativity.
In practice
In a workshop on creativity, one might say this quote to encourage participants to draw from their life experiences.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.
I write what I don't know. It's way more interesting.
I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.
I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.
Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
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