“What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity…
Yet I want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one person consciously… transmits to others feelings he has experienced,
and that other people are infected by these feelings.” – Leo Tolstoy
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” – Frida Kahlo
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity. Connection is why we’re here.” – Brene Brown
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James Baldwin
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” – Madeleine L’Engle
“The hardest thing is to do something which is close to your heart, exposing yourself to vulnerability.” – Marina Abromovic
“This is no book, Who touches this touches a man.” – Walt Whitman
“I’m so unused to being—well, understood, perhaps…” – Vladimir Nabokov
The artist’s almost pathological need to be understood is like the sudden, insane, illogical desire of a soldier in the trenches of war to stand up and wave at the enemy only to have them lob a grenade into his midst killing them and everyone around them.
Some artists fulfil the need by taking another person, cutting them open and climbing inside of them to warm up from the cold of reality and existence…oblivious to the destruction they wreak upon the other.
Some artists do both.
The artist is mentally ill…everyone around the artist knows it, but not as well as the artist themself.
