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Stuart Shils During The Art Digger Workshop University f Fine Arts UCM Madrid 2016
In mid July 2016, I was lucky enough to be able to organize a workshop with Stuart Shils at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid. We were a small group of 15 artists and I think I am not wrong if I say that sharing those days with Stuart Shils was an unforgettable experience for all of us.
While looking over my notes and references of the event, I found the recording of the wrap-up words of Stuart Shils to close the workshop. When listening to them again I couldn’t stop thinking that I should share them so that other artists who could not attend had the opportunity to listen to them.
So I decided to publish this final speech despite the deficiencies of sound and ambient noise and overcoming my concerns about the improvised and sometimes inaccurate translation I did then. I put some images and background music to help you get in context. For Spanish speakers, I hope you can excuse me for the translation mistakes. It consoles me to think that as a whole I have been able to translate the ultimate meaning of Stuart Shils words. He no longer speak of pictorial technique or color or composition but of attitude and what it means to be an artist.
I end up by transcribing the quote from Rilke that Stuart Shils recites as the closing of his speech:
“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. — Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
Music: Chopin Nocturnes Op 48 nº2, Luke-Faulkner MUSOPEN
Burning Man Books
Scriptor Press, 32 Newman Rd. #2, Malden, Massachusetts 02148 cenacle@mindspring.com www.geocities.com/scriptorpress
