Handmade Art Quotes

When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.

We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!

It is fairy dust and wanderlust that guide our hands to create what our hearts desire.

The lounge usually holds his couch, his easels, inks and oils, and original handmade paper imported straight from Kappa—Nihon of the Old World. The center of the lounge is always for the stage—a raised, soft, armless sofa where his subject poses. But this evening isn’t about the stage or his art. This evening, the lounge shouldn’t hold needless furniture. Tonight, Kuhawk is for one book. Tonight, all the moonlight coming through the transparent globe should illuminate only the Devil’s Book—the first key to everything the Mesmerizer seeks. Oh, the trouble he took to earn it!

When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art…which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s—every image, every cut… What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive. I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn’t have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn’t want to miss a thing. I feel so lucky to have known her. And to all young filmmakers: you need to watch Agnès Varda’s pictures.

Their eyes, warm not only with human bond but with the shared enjoyment of the art objects he sold, their mutual tastes and satisfactions, remained fixed on him; they were thanking him for having things like these for them to see, pick up and examine, handle perhaps without even buying. Yes, he thought, they know what sort of store they are in; this is not tourist trash, not redwood plaques reading Muir Woods, Marin County, PSA, or funny signs or girly rings or postcards or views of the Bridge. The girl’s eyes especially, large, dark. How easily, Childan thought, I could fall in love with a girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren’t bad enough already. The stylish black hair, lacquered nails, pierced ears for the long dangling brass handmade earrings. “Your

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

My honors thesis project was my first interactive exhibit, in which two facing chairs were activated by a motion sensor when the viewer walked by. One was a cofortable armchair of plush red velvet, with a dildo sticking out of a hole in the seat. When activated, the dildo moved up and down and a strobe light pulsed. The facing chair was hard and uncomfortable, with spikes protruding from the seat, and when the viewer walked by it a dog would bark. The juxtaposition of the two chairs was meant to represent how forces of repression censor the desire for liberation. In that same exhibition, I showed a handmade box in the shape of a cross, decorated with a beautiful painting of the Holy Trinity. The viewer was encouraged to open the box, where they would find a dildo wrapped in the American flag and nailed to a cross-- this was meant to symbolize the hypocrisy and repression that is hidden under the attractive facade of organized religion. The dildo was surrounded by pages from the Bible, which were themselves surrounded by images of the sickness and starvation caused by the embargo in Iraq, a comment on the effects of imposing one culture and religion on another.

It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier period.

THE SK8 MAKER VS. GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION This new era of global industrialization is where my personal analogy with the history of the skateboard maker diverges. It’s no longer cost-effective to run a small skateboard company in the U.S., and the handful of startups that pull it off are few and far between. The mega manufacturers who can churn out millions of decks at low cost and record speed each year in Chinese factories employ proprietary equipment and techniques that you and I can barely imagine. Drills that can cut all eight truck holes in a stack of skateboard decks in a single pull. CNC machinery to create CAD-perfect molds used by giant two-sided hydraulic presses that can press dozens of boards in a few hours. Computer-operated cutting bits that can stamp out a deck to within 1⁄64 in. of its specified shape. And industrial grade machines that apply multicolored heat-transfer graphics in minutes. In a way, this factory automation has propelled skateboarding to become a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. The best skateboarders require this level of precision in each deck. Otherwise, they could end up on their tails after a failed trick. Or much worse. As the commercial deck relies more and more on a process that is out of reach for mere mortals, there is great value in the handmade and one of a kind. Making things from scratch is a dying art on the brink of extinction. It was pushed to the edge when public schools dismissed woodworking classes and turned the school woodshop into a computer lab. And when you separate society from how things are made—even a skateboard—you lose touch with the labor and the materials and processes that contributed to its existence in the first place. It’s not long before you take for granted the value of an object. The result is a world where cheap labor produces cheap goods consumed by careless customers who don’t even value the things they own.

Neither approach works by itself. One gives us only product, the other only process. To be an artist in the world today requires a blending of the two in order to survive, to succeed in making and selling your work. This has to be done in a way that feeds your soul, not saps it. Pirsig posed this dilemma in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was his understanding that these two views of the world have to merge in order for anyone to be at peace in the world. Technology is not bad in itself. It is how it is used and the effect it has on the maker, the builder, and the mechanic that’s crucial. He understood that the classic mode is primarily theoretic but has its own aesthetic. The romantic mode is primarily aesthetic but also has theory. The two can merge and work together at the bench. Pirsig’s goal was to bring these two points of view together to find the essence of Quality. Preintellectual awareness was how he put it. Understanding something before your mind could name it. It’s not just seeing the tool on the bench and your knowledge and experience of what it can do, but seeing it and knowing the feel of it in your hand. One combines these two senses together in a preintellectual awareness in order to understand Pirsig’s notion of Quality, his Zen approach to living and being in the world.

He orders a batch of handmade tiedyed shirts from Guizhou province and takes them to a graduate student at the Central Authority Fine Arts School to find out what to charge. The graduate student swings his long hair back and forth and tells Hao An these shirts are not authentic enough, not tribal enough. No way are young Beijingers going to be interested in them: there’s no art, no attitude. “What should I do now then?” asks Hao An. The graduate student tells him to head to the bars in Sanlitun and sell them to drunken foreigners and pretentious businessmen with art collections.

He found arrows cut by hand from tree limbs and tipped with flint points. A knife of quartz, jagged and hand-sized, was embedded in the earth. And there was blood. Whatever else had happened here, the Wild Ones—armed only with handmade weapons—had chased off a much more advanced Transport dropship armed with a state-of-the-art Gatling laser. The Amishman in him appreciated the irony. The soldier in him was impressed as hell.

Sometimes it’s not about selling my handmade crafts. Sometimes it’s about giving myself handjobs and calling the product “arts and crafts.

No dish in history has as many variations, colors, motifs, tastes, textures and subtleties as a dish of pasta.

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Many people are not getting anyplace with God because they have never met that kind of God. Their God is a self-made God and carries with Him no mystery or majesty. I will never bow my knee to a self-made or handmade God. I bow my knee to that mysterium tremendum—that awesome majesty we call our Father, which art in heaven.

The handmade object does not charm us simply because of its usefulness. It lives in complicity with our senses, and that is why it is so hard to get rid of it-it is like throwing a friend out of the house.

But it's still possible to find depths in Shuster's drawing. I can't help but see in these handmade fantasies the poignant products of young minds dreaming better tomorrows. The depth of engaged meditation, the focus that goes into writing and drawing even the crudest of the comics, emerges through the least-assured line. The pages are the result of human hours, and the glory and confusion of what it means to be here now—on a coffee and pills jag at four in the morning with a story to hand in by lunchtime—shines from between the lines of the lowliest eight-pager.

Minimalists tout the idea that nature builds with perfect thrift, when in fact the evidence of her extravagance is everywhere. In what economical world does a fruit fly perform dances or a moose carry a coat rack on its head? Spectacles that require a substantial investment of energy—colorful patterns or exuberant movements—demonstrate that an organism is vigorous enough to afford such a lavish expenditure. Evolutionary theorist Denis Dutton believed that a similar logic applies to all human art forms, from painting to music to the folk patterning so despised by Adolf Loos. Labor-intensive artwork, produced beautifully and abundantly, is like a handmade peacock’s tail. It says that you possess such copious energy and verve that you have plenty left over to devote to the joy of pure embellishment.

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You know those commercials where they show a plate of cooked pasta with a pile of sauce on top? That’s bullshit.