Art isn’t something that you marry.
It’s something that you rape.
A picture is an artifice that calls for
as much cunning as a crime.
Art is such a battle.
Yellow is a horrid thing.
Make a drawing.
Then begin again.
Then trace it.
Then begin again and trace again.
This hard path I have entered on
takes patience.
Painting is one’s private life.
Sometimes I lock myself away
and I don’t see the people that I love.
And in the end I’ll suffer for it.
Moods of sadness will come over anyone
who takes up art.
These dismal moods have little
compensation.
I can’t tell success from panic.
And I feel like a horse
whose cup is given to the jockey.
If painting weren’t so difficult
it wouldn’t be such fun.
You know
the Muses work all day
and then at night they dance.
From the words of Edgar Degas
Linda Frye Burnham 2013
“Leaves After Degas,” woodland banner by Steven Durland
Edgar Degas, “Two Dancers in Yellow and Pink” (1910)