What Yeats Said

From Mac Dewart: Yeats said, "We never know when life will catch fire and become art."

Here's a thought: We labor as sculptors not knowing really whether it's Art with a capital A or not.... but we pour our life force into the process none-the-less, we exhaust ourselves mounting shows, we scrounge and borrow and go broke at the last minute, hoping for that moment of fire when the work comes alive and we can't take our eyes off it. In my own work, I never know for sure, but.... in Your Work all of you.....I find inspiration. Three examples: walking into Charles Jones' show, I had to shout out loud, so dazzlingly strong and authoritative the drawing and sculpture was. Looking carefully at Rosalyn Driscoll's piece The Nothingness of Fire, it seemed a tour de force, like nothing I'd ever seen, yet also like everything...flesh, mountain, river...the light at the heart of the world. And at the Scoop show one night, there was a cluster of onlookers around David Lang's piece in the window absolutely mystified, shouting their amazement "at the pigs that could fly." Thank you all for your moments of fire.

Eric Sealine responds: I remember seeing a show at the Art Institute in Chicago in about 1975. I had driven six hours from Ames, Iowa, and saw a substantial collection of genuinely contemporary art for essentially the first time. There was a Christopher Wilmarth sculpture on the wall, about 3' square, of slumped glass, maybe 3/8" thick, with the center square frosted and the rest clear. It was hung from the wall with a single wire that passed down one side on front, around the back, and back up the other side of the front. The shadow was an integral part of the object. It was the most beautiful and elegant and simple thing I had ever seen, and at that moment it occurred to me that this was something you could make your life about. I walked into the museum as one of those young vaguely artsy types, and I walked out as an artist. You never know.

What's YOUR experience? Let us know -

Laura Evans and Jessica Straus in Trigger and Reconfigure

Trigger and Reconfigure
Jan. 22 - Feb. 21, 2011
Jewitt Gallery at Wellesley College

This exhibition explores how an artwork begins with an encounter between an object or image and the artist. The found form, not necessarily interesting or beautiful to others, is so compelling to the artist that it must be engaged with, seized even. Intuitively the artist understands the possibilities this form offers for reinvention. And thus the art-making process begins. There will be dialogue surely, sometimes a grappling, a coaxing or a nudging of this form until new light or a new life emerges.