Stephen Nachmanovitch Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Change, Art, Lying

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.183, Penguin

• Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Inspirational, Art, Creativity

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.42, Penguin

• Play is the taproot from which original art springs. It is the raw stuff that the artist channels with all his learning and technique.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Spring, Playing Games

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.42, Penguin

• Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being. . . . We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Creativity, Creative

• In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time.
  Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing
  and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the
  areas in which we feel most stuck and most incompetent may be our richest gold mine of developing
  material. The use of silence in teaching then becomes very powerful.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Powerful, Teaching

• The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there.... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Struggle, Hands

• Play, creativity, art, spontaneity, all these experiences are their own rewards and are blocked when we perform for reward or punishment, profit or loss.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Creativity, Loss

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.45, Penguin

• The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Way, Success And Failure

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.135, Penguin

• Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Crafts, Action

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.10, Penguin

• Many musicians are fabulously skilled at playing the black dots on the printed page, but mystified by how the dots got there in the first place and apprehensive of playing without dots. Music theory does not help here; it teaches rules of the grammar, but not what to say. When people ask me how to improvise, only a little of what I can say is about music. The real story is about spontaneous expression, and it is therefore a spiritual and a psychological story rather than a story about the technique of one art form or another.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Spiritual, Art, Real

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.9, Penguin

• If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Art, Teach, Persons

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