"I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others."
Ezra Pound

"By slowing the course of their night, by dividing it into different stages, each separate from the next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance of a marvelous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory...
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still to close to him in time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."
from Slowness by Milan Kundera

...
"I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape of the paper- though
that too- but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."

from Poetics by A.R. Ammons

Winter Walking, 11x17"

" I don't like to arrange things, if I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."
Diane Arbus

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."
Anais Nin

...
"Each year she crossed a line
Through the front page of a fresh diary
And vowed to live above the line"
...
"The line in the painting was surrounded by light
The light in the painting held its breath
On the threshold of a discovery"
...

from THE HORIZONTAL LINE (Homage to Agnes Martin)
by Edward Hirsch

"It was only after the conclusion, after everything was over, that the sense of reality returned, long after, in fact, when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the pattern. This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent on this principle."
from All the King Men by Robert Penn Warren

"We start our lives in chaos and babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control...to plot is to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness."
from White Noise by Don DeLillo

"He blamed the handful of books he'd read as a young man, which convinced him life only had value experienced at a certain level of possibility. He hungered for that sense of infinite promise. If only we can hope to climb ever upward, we have our reason for moving. It wasn't the ladder of material success he schemed to scale- Lev wanted something more boyish: to search for a grail that would give meaning to everything that came before. Without it the deserts of dailiness weren't worth the trouble and the past was a trousseau of dust."
from Ambassador to the Dead by Askold Melnyczuk

"...it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears."
from The Gift by Lewis Hyde

liberatory, 11x16"

now in the collection of Teresa Indjein

"I see that I must give what I most need."
from Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

"You will be judged by the difference between what you did, and what you might have done."
from BIRTHPLACE moving into nearness by William S. Wilson

"The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom, to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition- and therefore more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain."
Joseph Conrad

"I usually work in a direction until i know how to do it, then I stop....art shouldn't be a fixed idea that I have before making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with."
Robert Rauschenberg

"Whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred, must be clothed in mystery."
Stephane Mallarme

"a poet's medium is words positioned so as to lead you to the edge where words stop"
from Eros by Anne Carson

"The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked. I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential."
from Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine

okay, 11x17"

now in the collection of
Jan Strickland, New Hampshire