The Quick Q & A editorial in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine is a much loved regular feature, in which we ask 6 artists the same 4 questions. In the September 2018 Issue 22, these were the Quick Q & A questions:
- If you had to choose only three words that you feel best describes your work what would they be, and why?
- Many things inundate our daily lives. What role do you feel art and the artist still have in today’s society?
- If you could collaborate with any artist, dead or alive, who would it be with and why?
- What do you think is the single most important piece of advice you have been given as an artist?
We feel that the artists’ responses provide such a valuable insight for our community of artists that we wanted to share one Quick Q & A response from each issue with you, going forward. The September 2018 Issue 22 print issue is sold out, but you can download the digital magazine via our webstore to read more. To ensure you never miss an issue again, you can also subscribe to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, and have each issue sent straight to your door each quarter.
Excerpt from Issue 22 // September 2018 Quick Q & A editorial: Artists Nunzio Paci, Alessia Iannetti, Kurtis Rykovich, Paul Barnes, Daria Hlazatova, and Anton Semenov respond to the below Quick Q & A:
What do you think is the single most important piece of advice you have been given as an artist?
“I’ve never been given advice as an artist.
I have been wrong a million times, but I do believe that making mistakes makes you stronger. I’ve always followed my instinct, my heart and my genuine feelings, trying to do my work in the most honest way possible.”
“At the end of my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, the artist Omar Galliani, my painting professor, wrote me an email saying: “keep nurturing your sweet and seducing chimaeras. Fly, never stop, devour books, devour images and think that if you love ‘drawing’ it will never leave you!”
“This is going to sound so typical, but a mentor once told me to “Be You, and Screw Them!!” She was referring to reactions to my subject matter choices. I was never the favourite in art school, it never came down to technique but I was always chastised for my choice of subject matter. It wasn’t until I ignored what everyone said I should be doing and started to be myself that my work began to come together. I have come to the conclusion that I will never paint or be like someone else, no matter how much I want to be. We each have our own paths and set out to achieve what we want in our own unique way. My life story will never be like someone else’s, and I can finally say that I do not want it to be.”
“It’s difficult to restrict this to just one thing as such a wide variety of fascinating people have shared wise words with me from my childhood through to the present day; however, most of the advice I receive arrives indirectly from just meeting and talking to interesting people and also absorbing and understanding their art, like something you see or hear that inspires and changes what you do. In general, most creative advice I’ve remembered has come from humble people who produce art. So, either directly or indirectly, the summation of their advice/thoughts is to paint from the heart, trust your
judgement, make mistakes, but have faith in your art and its future.”
“Time management is very important for a freelance artist, so I got my advice from none other than Gandalf himself, who said that all we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us. I apply this principle to my life as well and try to put my ideas into action as I go along. The ‘right time’ may never come, and one can wait for years and years – so the right thing is to do it now!”
“Do what you like, life is too short to spend it on something that we don’t like. Get pleasure from the process, if you do not like what you do then you are just busy for the sake of busyness. Also listen less to the opinions of others, especially those who constantly criticize you. It is enough for you to choose two or three people whom you really trust, and to whose opinion you can listen, that’s enough. I know how important this is for novice artists, criticism and misunderstanding can kill the love of creativity.”
