Advice from Joseph Grigely

Joseph Grigely's art is an art about conversations--the paths they take, the shapes and colors they have, and the stories they tell in the process of being retold. Grigely, who became deaf as a result of a childhood accident, uses as his raw material the written conversations that he has in his daily life; the scraps of paper on which hearing people have written notes, names, or phrases in order to 'converse' with him when he cannot read their lips. He uses these scraps of conversations to build wall pieces and table-top tableaus that all take as their subject matter the ineluctable differences between speech and writing, and reading and listening.

To read more about his work, go to http://gandy-gallery.com/exhib/joseph_grigely/exhib_joseph_grigely.html.

I read the book Letters to a Young Artist during my lunch time, and today I read the letter Joseph Grigely wrote. He talks about the poet John Keats and his way in "Negative Capability." Here is an excerpt:

"... Two hundred years ago, the poet John Keats faced the same struggle: He was overwhelmed with financial difficulties, and when he looked at the stuff that had been written before him - Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton - he resigned himself to the dispiriting question, 'What is there left to do?'
  He kept at it. In the space of a couple of years he wrote a half dozen odes that took poetry in a new direction, got a lot of bad press, saw his books remaindered, and died just after turning twenty-five. Plus, the girl he wanted said: no.

He called it Nagative Capability. Rather than trying to make sense of all the details that comprise the worrisome practice of being an artist, he wholeheartedly - and also wholeheadedly - got lost in the process of writing the best poems he could. In the letter to his brothers, Keats described Negative Capability as a way of being, wherein one 'is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.'

... So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is not to worry too much about those uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. If making art is hard work - and it is - equally hard is the process of being an artist, of bringing the work to a public. This is where human relations are so important... So read as much as you can and get into the thick of life whenever you can - learn a foreign language, learn things about other people, go places and do things that have nothing to do with art - because it's the stuff that has nothing to do with art that has everything to do with art.

With best wishes,

Joseph Grigely

Happy Friday, everyone!