Just started reading If You Want To Write, A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland. I’m about 20 or so pages into it. This is from one of the first footnotes:
Whenever I say “writing” in this book I also mean anything that you love and want to do or to make. It may be a six-act tragedy in blank verse, it may be dressmaking or acrobatics, or inventing a new system of double entry book-keeping. But you must be sure that your imagination and love are behind it, that you are not working just from grim resolution, i.e., to make money or impress people.
and then, from page nineteen:
…Van Gogh… said in his letter something like this: “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about design and balance and getting interesting planes into your painting, and avoided , with the most stringent severity, showing the faintest academical tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.
But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was and the creative impulse, It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
