Everyday's a good day when you paint
Bob RossRead
Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of recognizing and fulfilling the unique potential of materials, particularly in woodworking.
George Nakashima suggests that each piece of wood has a specific purpose that reflects its best qualities. The woodworker's role is to skillfully identify and craft that purpose, transforming the raw material into something beautiful and functional, thereby honoring the wood's inherent potential.
In practice
In a speech about creativity in art, one might refer to this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding materials.
Everyday's a good day when you paint
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.
I really don't care that much about "Beauties." What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It's not "talkies." Talkers are doing something.
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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