What A Great Weekend.

We had a great weekend here in northern California, blue skies, lots of sunshine and warm weather.

After all the cold weather and rain, it was nice to be able to work in the garden again. There is a lot more that needs to be done, but first we need to let the soil dry out before we can do anything else.

Of course, we went to our favorite book/coffee place to peruse the art magazines, and just sit, relax and people watch. My husband brought along his sketchbook and camera, and took some pictures.

Snoopy Statue

Today, I was thinking about what it means to be an artist, and how we define art. How do we define what it is that we do? It seems there are a lot of opinions about this subject and I wanted to share some of them with you.

Mirka Mora, painter
– Art is the child of imagination and gives life.

Geoffrey Ricardo, printmaker
– Having an itch you can’t scratch.

Bernard Smith, art historian
– Art is anything that requires a maker; it cannot make itself – this is Aristotle’s definition in The Nicomachian Ethics, and I think it to be the best.

Kate Cherry, associate director, Melbourne Theatre Company
– Art is indefinable.

Jan Senbergs, painter
– I asked our dog Ruby and she didn’t know either …

William Wright, curatorial director, Sherman Galleries, Sydney
– For as long as we’ve been able to hoot, toot, tap bones and make effigies out of bits of clay and other inchoate stuff, art has been integral to our species; the imaginative end of our need to conceptualize.