Twelve Quotes by Carl Jung

-- As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. 

-- One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

-- Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

-- The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

-- The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

-- There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

-- We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

-- Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

-- We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

-- Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

-- Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

-- Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Still Life Watercolors of Cezanne

Still Life with Watermelon and Pomegranates

• "An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all."
• "With an apple I will astonish Paris."
  
  

  

  Still Life with Apples on a Sideboard

• "Right now a moment of time is passing by! We must become that moment."
• "There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other." 

Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit

The Green Pot

• "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art." 
• "The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it."

Still Life with Blue Pot

Dina Vierny - A Model for Maillol

William Grimes's obituary from the New York Times, January 27, 2009:

Dina Vierny, the model whose ample flesh and soft curves inspired the sculptor Aristide Maillol, rejuvenating his career, and who eventually founded a museum dedicated to his work, died on Jan. 20 in Paris. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, which she founded in 1995.

In the same period when she was modeling, Ms. Vierny, who had joined the Resistance early on during World War II, led refugees from Nazism across the Pyrenees into Spain as part of an American organization operating out of Marseille.

Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums.

“Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir,” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.”

For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic.

Maillol threw himself into his sculpture with renewed energy and, at Ms. Vierny’s urging, began painting again. After his death, she worked tirelessly to promote his art and enhance his reputation, eventually creating the Maillol Museum and donating 18 sculptures to the French government on the condition that they be placed in the Jardin des Tuileries. She later added two more.

Ms. Vierny was born in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, in 1919 and was taken by her parents to France when she was a child. Her father, who played the piano at movie houses, made a modest living while opening his home to an entertaining collection of artists and writers.

Ms. Vierny, who was intent on studying physics and chemistry, took to the role of artist’s muse reluctantly at first, posing during school vacations and glancing sideways at her schoolbooks on a nearby stand. The generous modeling fees and Maillol’s sense of fun won her over.

For the first two years, though, she kept her clothes on, not out of modesty — she and her friends belonged to a nudist club — but because of Maillol’s timidity. She herself later proposed that he try some nude studies. “Since he never asked, I figured he would never have the courage,” she told National Public Radio last year.

Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol,” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather,” “The Mountain,” “Air,” “The River,” and “Harmony,” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf,” now in the Maillol Museum.

In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish.

Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room.

A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work,” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.”

Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia,” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls.

She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.”

In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.

After the war, Ms. Vierny opened an art gallery in Paris, where she exhibited Maillol’s work, as well as that of others. After traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, she began collecting and showing work by dissident artists like Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov.

A passionate and unpredictable collector, Ms. Vierny accumulated no fewer than 90 antique carriages, including the omnibus that Toulouse-Lautrec used to pick up his friends and the carriage used by Chateaubriand when he was ambassador to Italy.

In the early 1970s, Ms. Vierny decided to start a Maillol museum. She began buying up apartments on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, selling off her collection of 654 dolls along the way. In 1995 she opened the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, whose permanent collection also includes work by Degas, Kandinsky, Picasso, Duchamp and assorted naïve artists, yet another of Ms. Vierny’s enthusiasms.

It was at the museum that Ms. Vierny lived the rest of her life. She is survived by her two sons, Olivier Lorquin, the director of the Maillol Museum, and the art historian Bertrand Lorquin, its curator. The Maillol connection continues after her death. It may even have preceded her birth.

“One day, I was climbing up an almond tree and Maillol turned to my father,” Ms. Vierny told The Independent of London in 1996. “He said to him, ‘You made her, but it was I who invented her.’ And he really did believe that he had invented me. He said that he had been drawing my features for 20 years before my birth.”

Jimmy Webb with Mark Knopfler - The Highwayman

Poem by e. e. cummings

[love is more thicker than forget]

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is more mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

Martha Graham-- quotes & part 1/4 from Appalachian Spring

-- First we have to believe, and then we believe.

-- It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

-- The body is a sacred garment.

-- There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.

-- You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

-- I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

Quotes by Black Elk, Chief Joseph, Chief Seattle, and Crazy Horse

Black Elk and Family

-- You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.

-- From that time on, I always got up very early to see the rising of the daybreak star. People knew that I did this, and many would get up to see it with me, and when it came we said: "Behold the star of understanding!"

Chief Joseph and Family

-- The earth and myself are of one mind.

-- It does not require many words to speak the truth.

Chief Seattle

-- The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man.

-- Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Crazy Horse

-- One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

-- A very great vision is needed and the man who has it must follow it as the eagle seeks the deepest blue of the sky.

The Gates: Land art in Central Park NYC 2005 by Christo & Jeanne-Claude

Three Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

-- Don't let that horse

Don't let that horse
         eat that violin
cried Chagall's mother 

             But he
        kept right on
             painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
                  The Horse With Violin In Mouth
And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
                 and rode away
        waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
                 attached

-- Driving a cardboard automobile without a license

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
      at the turn of the century
   my father ran into my mother
                  on a fun-ride at Coney Island
         having spied each other eating
             in a French boardinghouse nearby
            And having decided right there and then
                           that she was right for him entirely
   he followed her into
                           the playland of that evening
         where the headlong meeting 
            of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
         hurtled them forever together


And I now in the back seat
               of their eternity
                     reaching out to embrace them 

-- Recipe for happiness in Khabarovsk or any place

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black
coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

Three reliefs from the "Gates of Paradise" by Lorenzo Ghiberti

Adam and Eve

Jacob and Esau

David and Goliath

The Drums of Babatunde Olatunji

Three Poems by Robert Bly

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

For Donald Hall

Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.

There was no
Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium, bones would do. What happened then?

It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, making some food for the cat.


Living at the End of Time

There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,
And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.

I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.

A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.

Some say we are living at the end of time,
But I believe a thousand pagan ministers
Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist
Has been laying his hands on earth for so long
That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.

It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster
Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel
So much satisfaction when a train goes by.

Quote by Susanne Langer

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
    Susanne Langer - Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953)

Three Paintings of The Good Samaritan

Johann Carl Loth

Delacroix

Rembrandt

Lewis Hine - Child Labor Photographs

"Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance."-- Lewis Hine

McCoy Tyner Trio - Monk's Dream

Georges Braque - Seven Lithographs and Two Quotes

-- "I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical process, this perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.. ..When one got to thinking like that, everything changed, you cannot imagine how much!"

-- "Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny"