I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an artist's struggle with experimenting beyond their familiar boundaries and the challenges that come with it.
Irving Penn expresses the difficulty of stepping outside of one's expertise and comfort zone, acknowledging that while attempts to innovate may have been made, the unpredictable nature of new environments can lead to failure. This statement highlights the tension between creativity and the constraints of one's established skills, suggesting that true mastery may lie within a more focused and controlled artistic practice.
In practice
An artist might share this quote during a workshop to emphasize the importance of knowing one's artistic limits.
Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.
I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.
I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.
I can’t worry too much about the everyday things. Otherwise I’d lose touch with my own world, that helps me as an artist, but it’s frustrating for the people around me. I’m vaguely functional, but there’s always something slightly off.
I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!"
I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.
Great art picks up where nature ends.
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