Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 9/12/03: Look in the rear-view mirror.

Jacob Lawrence, "Artist With Tools," 1994 — Jacob Lawrence, *Artist With Tools* (1994)

September 12, 2003:

Look in the rear-view mirror. What you see there from your bumper to the horizon are minutes from your life that you will never have back again.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality...the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.... Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.... The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. — T.S Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

We know of no great artist who has ever done anything but serve his work and only his work. — Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation."