You don't decide to paint. It's like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It's a need, not a choice.
Interpretation
Creating art is an instinctual drive rather than a conscious decision.
In this quote, Leonora Carrington expresses the idea that the act of creating art is akin to fulfilling a basic human need, like hunger. It implies that artists are compelled to create not because they choose to, but because they must, as if it's an intrinsic part of their identity and existence.
In practice
During an art workshop, I might say, 'As Leonora Carrington once said, creating art is a need, not a choice.'
You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.
I didn't have time to be anybody's muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.
I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
I've lost all my money on these films. They are not commercial. But I'm glad to lose it this way. To have for a souvenir of my life pictures like Umberto D. and The Bicycle Thief.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.
Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.
It's such a pleasant surprise when you come on set and you find someone in charge like Ken Branagh or James Ivory. You know that you're going to do a day's work and at the end of it, it's going to be good.
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