2D Vision

The essence of how to make a good poem

Simply

Shortly

Rhythmically

Memorably

John Betjeman

The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals

At that period in my life, I had no personal defenses.

I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.

I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy.

But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.

Joni Mitchell

Art is short for artificial…so the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation…

In a way it’s a lie to get you to see the truth.”

Joni Mitchell

. Nothing is impossible to the young, not until we become caught in the problems of living and forget to make-believe.

Perhaps these pictures of mine will keep all of us young a little longer, will stretch our imaginations enough to help keep us magically human. I hope so, I believe so—

Anno

Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved.

The shaping of the question is part of the answer

Piet Hein

Human beings exist in the world in some kind of concrete way, but they also exist in other people’s minds and stories

These are often two different versions of the same person and we are probably many contradictory and distinct characters to our friends and casual acquaintances.

Brian Kiteley

2005

Put your desk in the corner and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way round.

The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.

Stephen King    2020

This happens to me again and again: after long deliberations and sketches, a picture idea is finally clarified and “decided”, and when things get really serious, the picture suddenly shows you that it wants to be something else

Quint Buchholz    2020

Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.

Your job isn’t to find these ideas, but to recognise them when they show up.

Stephen King    2020

This product was crafted with a top quality vegetable tanned leather that changes over time.
The customizations that occur with its use are a statement of naturalness and authenticity.
Therefore minor losses of colour, small marks and imperfections are not to be considered a defect, but a peculiarity of this product and confirmation of its originality

bag or body?

Sometimes Hokusai also slipped drawings in between his sentences as an alternative or supplement to the text, giving the letters a unique personal touch

Kobayashi Tadashi

Isn’t it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible, and yet at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simply illustrating the object that you set out to do? Isn’t that what art is all about?

What I want to do is distort the thing far beyond appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance

Francis Bacon

As soon as we die we enter into fiction. We become the subject of stories

Change the viewpoint and the story is new

Hilary Mantel 2017

Sometimes I don’t feel any age at all
I feel naive and open to things

Elizabeth Jane Howard (age 90)

Poetry relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special, so that it will be remembered and valued.

John Carey  2020

It is our knowledge – the things we are sure of – that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from learning.

Lincoln Stiffens

Art is a basic human need, a basic human activity. It is what makes us human and offers us the tools to become ourselves. In a time when we are driven mad by the lure of false desires and the promise of objects of consumption, art can be a free and open space of experiment and experience. Art can release us from the need to possess objects of power and allow us to enter the field in which the power of objects frees us.

Antony Gormley   2011

Plato speaks of an artist turning the invisible world into the visible.

I hope that someone seeing my sculpture is lifted out of his ordinary state

Takis

The fool is a very important character in a Shakespeare play as he fulfills two important functions:

1. He has licence to speak truth to power with no holds barred – in a context where no-one else dare do that, for fear of their lives –  and he acts like the chorus in Greek drama – commenting on the characters and the action for the benefit of the audience.
2. He is usually the wisest character in the play. The other characters refer to him as ‘the fool’ and we usually know him as ‘the jester.’ He does not normally have a dramatic role but some fools do.

An unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator with a compromised viewpoint

Narrators serve as filters for stories. What narrators do not know or experience cannot be shown to the reader. The first-person narrator is powerful because that viewpoint is the only one that we have to judge the events on the page. The reader believes that the narrator will be truthful and provide an accurate account of the story.

When we have an unreliable narrator, the reader cannot trust his or her version of the story.

These narrators may be insane, angry, strung out on drugs or alcohol, naive, foreign, criminals, liars or simply younger than everybody else.

They can be comical or absurd, tragic or serious, terrifying or surreal.

The actors I like most are those who have an air of mystery about them, who don’t make themselves bigger than the story they’re telling. I’ve tried to be like that myself.

I think, as a storyteller, you’re interested more in the darker aspect of things. Often it’s where a lot of the gold is.

Shaun Evans

2019

It’s very hard to get rich and famous at a young age and handle it well…… Fortunately I wrote stuff that people didn’t like. I dodged a bullet there.

And it suddenly dawned on me – that’s why I’ll never win the love of the American public. They want artists to mean what they say.

Randy Newman

Although photography generates works that can be called art – it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure – photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris.

Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris

Susan Sontag

1977

The reason that a Mobius strip gives one a strange sensation is that, conceptually, the distinction between “front and back” which ought to be clear has become ambiguous and vague; this phenomenon, however, can also occur with other dualities such as “inside and outside”, “up and down” and “light and dark” … Yet this violation of logic still permits us to say that such a world is formed by “representational truth”

The small devil wondering, “Am I inside or outside the bottle” is concerned with this kind of “representational truth”.

Nakahara Yusuke

1977

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled from the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross

Susan Sontag

1977

My pictures are like maps, which perhaps only I can understand. Therefore, in following my maps there are some travellers who get lost. There are those who become angry when they discover they have been fooled; but there are also those who enter into the maze of my maps willingly, in an attempt to explore their accuracy for themselves.

Mitsumasa Anno

1980

Imagination (which is about impossibility) and reality aren’t opposites, but complement each other. One might say that reality and imagination differ from each other in the same way that the audience at a play is set apart from the actors. It’s where the two meet that hope is to be found.

Mitsumasa Anno

1980

A person who only looks for what he wants in painting will never find that which transcends his preferences. But, if one has been trapped by the mystery of an image which refuses all explanation, a moment of panic will sometimes occur. These moments of panic are what count for Magritte. For him they are privileged moments, because they transcend mediocrity. (But for that, there doesn’t have to be art – it can happen at any moment.)

Suzi Gablik

1970

The development of Magritte’s painting from 1924 until his death in 1967 may be studied by art historians; they will find him to be an artist who throughout his life confused every trail, displaced every landmark and turned dates into a jumble. It will suffice to say here that his work evolved from complexity to simplicity, from an outcry to eloquent silence, from arrogance to wisdom.

Since our friend left us, each of his pictures lives its own life and sheds on the world a magic radiance, so that we behold everyday sights through his eyes instead of our own.

E Langui

Brussels 1973

How slowly one advances in a boat that does not float with the stream in a specific direction! How much easier it is when one can connect with the work of great predecessors whose value is not doubted by anyone. A personal experiment, a construction whose foundations one must dig himself and whose walls one must erect himself, runs a real risk of becoming a humble hovel. But perhaps one prefers to live there rather than in a palace that has been built by others.

MC Escher  1958