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.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just absurd.
In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.
It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.
I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
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