That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
Interpretation
The artist's role is to transform raw elements of nature into something beautiful and illuminating.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of art and the artist's unique ability to take ordinary, often overlooked materials from the earth and mold them into something that shines with beauty and meaning. It highlights the artist's responsibility to bring forth light and inspiration from darkness, showcasing creativity as a means of revelation and connection between the natural world and the human experience.
In practice
In a speech about creativity at an art school graduation, one could quote this to inspire new artists.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Kid ... Comics will break your heart.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.
People are going to say, ‘Well, it’s not very truthful.’ But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth. It’s like people who read Shakespeare plays, but they never see a Shakespeare play. I think they just use his name.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.