lousy context does not necessarily diminish the inchoate, micro-rhizome-like network of opportunity and hope that swells invisibly just below the skeptical surface.

Anne Truitt wrote in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

learning everything I could, filling notebooks with formulas and shutter speeds and film characteristics, the technical information I needed to be competent, but also with revelation: sketched-out ideas for pictures yet to be taken, my own particular evolving aesthetic. And they were pictures that I soon took … and took … and kept taking. Over and

Patience, it turns out, can be learned, and over a long period of time I have learned it. Patience, in conjunction with its sibling, tenacity, can take the place of … that other thing.

To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship, and certainly deeper than those trifling laws protecting land ownership.

For Giacometti, this mask was a catalyst, a variety of coincidence Breton described as hasard objectif—objective chance—a confluence of fortuitous events that somehow, often long after the fact, appear predestined or preordained, possessed of an ineluctable power.

is what allows me to schedule, yes, schedule, creativity. It doesn’t drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the muse. You have to clear a well-lit and GPS-coordinated landing strip for it.

We each have our unique narrative, and its power derives not from what is sieved in from the surrounding culture, but from what you wrench out of the dense nucleus of chance and circumstance that is your life. The

still found something to say. Just as I always do, just as I believe I never will.