Isabel Huggan

What possibility is there of being yourself if you place your feet in another’s imprint.– Isabel Huggan

taken from “Notes on a Piece for Carol” published in ‘Dropped Threads’ edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson.

Filed under: Verse, writers

Verse – Thursday November 27th 2008

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 27th:

DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING BY JONNY LANG

(Jonny Lang – Songwriter, musician)

“I hope just one person’s life could be touched for the better…I just want to be a blessing for people. If I’m not doing it for that reason then I’m just fulfilling it for my own ego…I really don’t want to do that. Obviously, I want to be a positive influence in whosever life I can be.”

Jonny lang, is well one of the rare artists that write and create their music. With radio and music videos being a repeat of the same beats, the same themes it’s always refreshing to stumble upon great work. I stumbled upon Jonny lang with the release of his first album in 1995 at the age of 13 title “Smokin’” ad in 1997 released his first solo album ‘Lie To Me’ which led to a Grammy nomination in 1998.  In 2006, with his fifth album recorded he became a Grammy Winner. Not that I am surprised, he earned it as Lang speaks to you through his music, his voice and story telling lyrics it’s easy to find a track on his albums you’ll enjoy.

When my friends get bored of the usual they run to me and ask to go through my collection knowing I love a lot of a every genre. My friend stumbled upon my Jonny Lang collection (geeky me having it in alphabetical order they found them all haha) they took them home and called me the same day. Now this friend of my hates blues and Jonny Lang ‘just tore my soul up’ is how she put it. So I thought what a great Verse, he has great lyrics and he can move one with taste in certain genres to love a new one.

(The video below is of the song so you can listen to it and read it)

DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING

Living in the back of this car
How did I wind up in this place?
I never should have got this far
I was such a fool to run away.
Can’t believe I’m digging through this trash
Back at home I had a seat at the table.
Only thing holding me back
Is my inability to be grateful.

Today I’ve finally had enough
I’m sick and tired of this kind of life.
Listen to the voice inside.

I’m on a roll like a freight train,
Blow like a hurricane,
Run like a mustang.
Don’t Stop For Anything.

They say a Journey of a thousand miles
Starts when you take the first step.
Travel for a little while
And you won’t be coming back again.

Lighten my load.
Lighten my soul.
Leave some things beside the road,
Negativity, Pain and Misery
Are all just considered history.

I see, the storm is finally gone.
The sun is rising on a brand new day.
And now that I can see my way,

I’m a roll like a freight train
I’m a” blow like a hurricane
Going to run like a mustang.
Don’t stop, Don’t stop for anything.
I was meant to roll like a freight train.
Going to fly like a jet plane.
Coming back like a boomerang.
I won’t stop for anything.

Today I’ve finally had enough.
I’m sick and tired of this kinda life.
I listen to the voice inside.

I’m on a roll like a freight train.
Going to blow like a hurricane.
Got to run like a mustang.
I won’t stop, wont stop for anything.

You got to role like a freight train.
Going fly like a jet plane.
Coming through like a boomerang.
I wont stop for anything.

I’m coming through like a
A freight train, a freight train, a hurricane,
A mustang, a mustang, I won’t stop.
I won’t stop for anything.

Links:

MySpace: Jonny Lang
Listen to Don’t Stop For Anything – Jonny Lang (Stream)
Watch a short interview with Jonny lang
Official Website: Jonny Lang
Kiplish Interview with Jonny Lang

PAST VERSE FEATURES
Wednesday September 18th 2008 – Invictus
Wednesday September 23rd 2008 – Ode
Wednesday October 1st 2008 – Damaged
Wednesday October 8th 2008 – I Am A City
Wednesday October 15th 2008 – Sonnet LXXI
Wednesday October 23rd 2008 – The Colossus
Wednesday October 29, 2008 – The Invitation
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 – The Confidence Course
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 – We Are The Ones
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 – The Artist’s Life, Creativity
Thursday, November 27, 2008 – Don’t Stop For Anything

Filed under: Verse

Verse – Wednesday, November 19th

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19th:

DON GRAY

The Artist’s Life, Creativity (1994)

The artist is fundamentally alone in the creative process, whether he/she is supported and encouraged by other artists and lovers of art, or is solitary. The inner drama, the complex ebb and flow of feelings, hints and glimpses of images and ideas, the inner drive, urges, promptings and doubts — the often fierce, undeniable, gut-deep need to create — are those of individual artists alone, that they must somehow deal with through visions of the beauty and torment of the world.Artists are meant to probe heaven and hell, good and evil, beauty and ugliness — the full dimension of life on earth, humanity’s relations with itself, with nature, with God, and the universe, as their personal needs and interests dictate.The creative urge may be difficult to define, but all artists know it, have experienced it to greater or lesser degree. Its insistence will not let you be. You have to act on it, as you would any other profound physical or emotional need.Whether tired or ill, discouraged or otherwise wounded, the artist goes to his easel to assuage the force within demanding that he act, demanding its release, demanding its expression.Because this creativity is so much a part of the artist, to deny it would be like denying a lung or kidney permission to function. No wonder artists have spoken of their “muse” or, more forcefully, their “demon.” The demands that the fundamental creative drive makes on human beings are not light and casual ones. It is a force to be reckoned with (this is not to say that artists can never rest, that they should feel guilty if they do. But at times they are pushed through fatigue and difficulty by the intensity of the creative force).

The old joke — a somewhat sick one — “when the creative urge hits you, lie down until it goes away,” is not good advice. The avoidance or trivialization of something so profound can only lead to unhappiness and regret.

The greatest fear that artists can have, or should have — if fear of any kind is called for — is not of failure or success, but at the end of their lives looking back and seeing that they never really tried. They never really took art seriously enough.

They never pushed the limits of their stamina, feelings and perceptions, never took some chances on the canvas.

One of the truly peculiar things about creativity is its ebb and flow. Sometimes inspiration, motivation are strong and undeniable, other times so weak that to work takes an act of will and courage to reach the level of mere plodding. Yet, significant art can result from both conditions.

When artists feel in total command of their means, the process flows smoothly, fluently, irresistibly, vibrantly to its conclusion. Thought or rational mind play little or no role. The artist and the creative process seem as inevitable as forces of nature (which they are), a high wind, the sun’s intensity, a torrential downpour, the insistence of leaves and buds in spring pushing their way through warming earth and bark to reach the light.

Other times, the artist is a stranger in a strange land. What is this thing? A paintbrush? What am I to do with it? The once-natural, nearly unconscious procedure of raising brush from palette to canvas and back again has been interrupted as if nerve fiber had been cut.

Like a .350 hitter who suddenly, inexplicably, can’t get the ball out of the infield, the artist experiences a slump, a loss of naturalness. The flow of cause and effect, stimulus and creative result is broken.

The only thing the artist can do, the only thing the hitter can do, is keep painting, keep swinging at the ball. Sooner or later, contact will again be made, the creative rhythm will reassert itself.

One suspects that Cezanne was such an artist. He was never conventionally technically fluent despite his marvelous gifts of color and dense, intensely substantial form. To look at a Cezanne painting is to sense the struggle to “realize,” as he put it, his vision, his inner feeling of the form and meaning of things.

Artists feel incomplete without the intimate relationship with nature and life that the creation of art implies. Unlike an animal, tree or rock so naturally part of the world that it has no concept of alienation, no troubling separateness from nature, the creative process helps the artist overcome, at least temporarily, this painful human characteristic and sink deeply into nature’s matrix.

Some artists think, others don’t think a whit. Both are equally valid. The latter function automatically, instinctively, almost like compost. For most artists, art is a blend of thought and feeling. But all artists, to be significant, must work mainly from instinct, from the inner mysteries of feeling and responsiveness.

After the creative act is well underway or ended, analysis is useful in evaluating the work and solving problems (a mural obviously requires more preliminary planning than an easel painting). But the contemporary disease of over-rationality — starting a painting from the head rather than the heart — will chill it, will likely kill it, leading to art that gives off little light or heat for the warming of the soul.

Beyond the vagaries and uncertainties intrinsic to art at any time, are the difficulties and confusions of an age such as ours when art values, traditions and principles lie like rubble in the streets of a shattered civilization. In such an environment, it’s every artist for themselves, trying to make what they hope is art, whether it is or not.

What, then, is creativity? Creativity is what happens when the raw material of reality is filtered through a consciousness and transformed into a significant artistic vision. Creativity is responding to the profundities and miracles in nature and life that are commonly devalued, depontentized — simply not noticed — by the curse of human blindness and the mediocrity of the mind-numbing routine imposed on everyday existence.

Creativity is Cezanne seeing and sensing the poetry and mystery of life in the form and color of an apple (that tens of millions of people never see, they only eat), which he translates into timeless, organic, densely-molded art.

Creativity is Hieronymus Bosch manifesting the struggles, forces and counter-forces within society and the psyche through brilliantly imaginative, disturbingly bizarre symbols and images of humanity. It is Rembrandt’s unparalleled probing of the soul by means of an equally unparalleled grasp of rich paint-paste creating the corporeality of human flesh, the very material of physical reality.

Creativity is Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s ability to see the artistic possibilities in subjects from the underbelly of life, in “At the Moulin Rouge,” adding a strip of canvas to this great, nearly finished painting to make room for a large, wonderful, light-filled, “dream girl” with red lips, turquoise forehead, yellow hair and black hat. She pauses for a moment in the foreground of the picture, a glorious antidote to the glum group of intellectuals and prostitutes at the center table and the artist himself walking through the club, dwarfed by his infirmity, bad luck and tall cousin who accompanies him.

Creativity is the poet’s turning the common usage of words into the brilliant beauty of language in the service of revealing life to mankind in this final stanza from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold:

Ah, Love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

No “think tank,” committee, bureau, institute or commission — no group — governmental, corporate, private or academic, can ever achieve such beauty and profundity. They can encourage or kill them, but they can never create them. That is the province and function, the joy and despair of the artist alone. (http://www.jessieevans-dongray.com/essays/essay005.html)

Links:

Art Essays, Art Criticism & Poems by Don Gray
A Little on Don Gray
Artistic Statement

PAST VERSE FEATURES
Wednesday September 18th 2008 – Invictus
Wednesday September 23rd 2008 – Ode
Wednesday October 1st 2008 – Damaged
Wednesday October 8th 2008 – I Am A City
Wednesday October 15th 2008 – Sonnet LXXI
Wednesday October 23rd 2008 – The Colossus
Wednesday October 29, 2008 – The Invitation
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 – The Confidence Course
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 – We Are The Ones
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 – The Artist’s Life, Creativity

Filed under: Expression, Verse , a letter for artists, art is, artists fear, artists feel incomplete, artwork, best writers, c reation of art, Cezanne, creative process, creativity, creativity is..., dedicated to those who create, don gray, dover Beach, essays on art, essays on creativity, featured writer, forces of nature, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, inspiration, inspiration writers, Jesse Evans, Matthew Arnold, motivation, real art, relation with nature, Rembrandt, significant art, the artist's life, the best artists, the note to the artists, thinking outside the box, top authors, top writers, unique art, what is art, writers fear