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Bertien van Manen

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I think if you want to make art, at some point you have to suspend judgment, and you have to involve yourself with play and not worry about the outcome. —Richard Serra (Nov 2,1938–March 26, 2024)

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Joan Mitchell

TWO SUNFLOWERS

1980 Diptique : Huile sur toile 279.4 x 360.7 x 0.0 cm

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“…A fact…my developing identity was ensnarled with the camera, its natural power to encode and communicate that which was in front of me and that which was in me.”—Larry Fink 

If you don’t know who Larry Fink is, you should: he’s one of our great, American photographers. Primarily known for his celebrity and High-Society, black & white images documenting the rich at play, Fink’s work–and more importantly his intention—has always been deep, philosophical and imbued with his progressive political leanings. As an artist, he’s a man of the moment, in the moment. For as he says, “The photograph is an attempt to give the perception of the moment some relationship to immortality.” As a professor, Fink has gone on to teach generations of young photographers. 

Long before he was “Larry Fink,” however, he was just a kid from Brooklyn with a camera. At the age of 17 in 1958, he happened upon a group of local Beatniks in Greenwich Village who allowed him and his camera to be part of their scene, and perhaps, to give immortality to their beat existence. This series which has been crafted into a lovely book, “The Beats,” reveals Fink’s precociousness as a photographer. To be a kid, with no formal photographic training, who can take images this good, tells us many things. One of which is that talent is often innate.

The other thing it demonstrates is that getting an MFA, especially in Photography, is a waste of money. It breaks my heart to meet young photographers who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, who come out of brand-name MFA programs and suddenly find themselves back at square one. Better to get $50-100K in debt (or not!), traveling the world taking photographs, or spending the money on a meaningful documentary project. 

It is the photographers like Larry Fink, who, ironically, never finished college, who go on to be the Professors and the recognized Masters. It is the photographers willing to create their own rules and map their own destinies, who go on to greatness–to be the ones whom we revere and study. The world doesn’t care about an MFA. We want the best you’ve got.–Lane Nevares

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“It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we’re quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that’s useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can’t know exactly what it is we are doing… It’s cool to be wrong. It’s so essential, so necessary. It’s so appropriate to be confused, to be muddled, to be unsure. We preach clarity. Get your ideas organized. Get your thinking straight. And it’s the kind of stuff we all got from our parents, because that’s the role of parents. But it is the aliveness of the unguarded intuition and the persistence of our own feelings that guide us to our discoveries… Everything really good in our experience is in some way beyond our control.”

— Emmet Gowin 

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“Helen Frankenthaler said she had no plan when she went to paint: “There is no ‘always.’ No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.””

— Ada Calhoun, “Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me” (Grove Press, June 14, 2022) 

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Lois Dodd

Wissemann's at Night, 2005

oil on masonite

7 7/8 x 19 inches

Lois Dodd

Queen Anne's Lace, 2012

oil on panel

11 x 11 inches

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Alex Katz, Reflection, 2010, Screenprint

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Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Try never get drunk outside yr own house

Be in love with yr life

Something that you feel will find its own form

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

The unspeakable visions of the individual

No time for poetry but exactly what is

Visionary tics shivering in the chest

In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Like Proust be an old teahead of time

Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

Accept loss forever

Believe in the holy contour of life

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You’re a Genius all the time

Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The list was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem “Howl” was written — which is of little surprise, given Ginsberg readily admitted Kerouac’s influence and even noted in the dedication of Howl and Other Poems that he took the title from Kerouac. more on Branpickings

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“You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.” —Sol LeWitt, in a letter to Eva Hesse

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“Painters are amongst the priests – worker priests of the cult of man – searching to understand but never know.” -brice marden

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Brice Marden by Robert Mapplethorpe

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Brice Marden, Star (for Patti Smith) (1974)

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Fare thee well, Brice Marden (Oct 13, 1938- Aug 9, 2023)

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Moira Jane Dryer

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Moira Dryer, In The Flesh, 1990

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Alex Katz Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett 1, 1972 Screenprint in five colors 30 x 36 inches