Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.
— Chuck Close
(via bbook)
At the age of 19, on the beach with two friends, a poet and an artist, [Yves] Klein “signed the sky” as his first work of art. In the mid-1950s he developed a smoldering ultramarine pigment that in a stroke of branding genius, he patented and named International Klein Blue.