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A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.

Anne Truitt

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Anne Truitt
Age: 83 †
Born: 1921
Born: March 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 23
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Sculptor
Baltimore
Maryland
Anne Dean Truitt
Anne Dean
Enough
Leaving
Work
Mystery
Industry
Simply
Confounds
Lasts
Aside
Last
Reward
Art
Analysis
Problem
Rewards

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I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life.
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Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.
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The end of parenthood is implicit in its beginning: separation.
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the knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.
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I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside.
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Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.
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When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio.
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There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.
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The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own intimate sensitivity.
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the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.
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January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings.
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I have no home but me.
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Artists have no choice but to express their lives.
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There's a small still center into which conception can arrive. And when it arrives, you make it welcome with your experience.
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artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.
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Art comes into the highest part of the mind, that with which we can know the presence of God.
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The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.
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I never decided at all to be an artist being an artist seems to have happened to me.
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Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.
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Humility is the daughter of truth.
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