Wednesday, November 14, 2007

THE TRUTH OF THE WORK ITSELF

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite of what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
(Thomas Merton)

To action alone have you a right, and never at all to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive; Neither let there be in you any attachment to inaction.
(The Bhagavad Gita)

(pastel drawing from the early 1980s, by Old Girl Of The North Country)

6 comments:

Loren said...

Perhaps the best part of art is that thinking about the result always comes after the act of creating, not during it.

I do art for the love of the doing.

Later I consider if I can sell some of it in order to keep doing it as much as I love.

am said...

That's so true. The "love of the doing."

Anonymous said...

the act of being and knowing that it is art.

am said...

That's so true, too.

Zach said...

i love the drawing big time. what would the world be like without fine art? a never ending bad dream.

am said...

Zach -- Interesting that you found this particular drawing. It is based on a photograph that was sent to me from Vietnam in 1970 by the man who inspired so much of my artwork between 1966 and 2008. My connection with him was what first inspired this blog. He died of complications from alcoholism and drug addiction in a VA hospital in 2008. He was an artist, too. He took me to see the first concert of The Band in the fateful spring of 1969 after he was drafted into the U.S. Army and just before leaving for basic training and becoming a helicopter mechanic:

http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/the-band/poster-art/poster/BG169.html