It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of pursuing one's passion and creativity each day as life is uncertain.
In this quote, Frank Auerbach expresses the idea that life is fleeting and unpredictable, which makes it essential to engage in one's true passion—painting, in his case—every day. He suggests that choosing not to embrace one's creative calling feels irrational in the face of life's uncertainties, urging individuals to prioritize their passions amid the unpredictability of existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about following your dreams, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of pursuing one's passion.
To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.
Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.
It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
After a while, when the writer is mature, it doesn't really matter - not because of finances but because of reputation. It doesn't really matter how many awards you get.
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
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