We need to shout from the rafters that all art and culture should be available to the Filipino people. It is important to banish the myth that we, the working class are only interested in noontime shows, basketball and teleseryes.
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Yes, yes, we could all say that we need to seize life and all that jazz but such spontaneity can only be viable if we have wealthy parents, ample trust funds, good family lawyers, or are about to die.
—Aunt Janey’s Old Fashioned Agony Column
You know it much like I do that the term “art” is kind of like a fucking joke. When people ask what you do, you say “Im an artist”, and it’s kind of hard to keep a straight face. Usually I’ll say technical illustrator and get a little more respect.
—Robert Williams
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
—Ira Glass
Never forget who you are, for surely the world won’t. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
—Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones
We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passe, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.
—art professor and author Dennis Button
