Iconic Painter Agnes Martin on Art, Solitude, and the Secret of Happiness

“Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.”

Agnes Martin (1912-2004) — legendary abstract painter, revered minimalist, celebrated reconstructionist — would have celebrated her 101st on March 22nd. She has arguably done for modern art what John Cage has for music. In this short 1997 interview, an 85-year-old Martin shares her wisdom on art, solitude, and the secret of happiness. Highlights below.

Martin makes a case for finding your purpose and doing what you love:

There are so many people who don’t know what they want. And I think that, in this world, that’s the only thing you have to know — exactly what you want. … Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.

Adding to history’s famous definitions of art and echoing Susan Sontag on music, Martin observes:

Art is responded to with emotion … and the best art is music — that’s the highest form of art. It’s completely abstract, and we make about eight times as much response to music than any of the other arts.

She admonishes against the egocentricity of the artist:

The worst thing you can think about when you’re working is yourself.

Seconding Maira Kalman on the value of the empty brain, Martin professes:

I’m an empty mind. When something comes into it, you can see it.

She echoes Hemingway’s insistence on solitude:

The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone.

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Henry Miller on the Mystery of the Universe and the Meaning of Life

“This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.”

More than merely one of the most memorable, prolific, and disciplined authors of the twentieth century, Henry Miller was also a champion of the wisdom of the heart, a poignant oracle of writing, a modern philosopher. But hardly anywhere does Miller’s spirit shine more brilliantly than in the 1974 gem This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn: Conversations with the Author from the Henry Miller Odyssey (public library) — not a book in the traditional sense, but “a transmutation, a reduction of the hours and hours of film and tape” that filmmaker Robert Snyder began recording in 1968 as the basis for the 1969 documentary The Henry Miller Odyssey. The book itself, as Snyder puts it, “is only a skimming of the film of the man” and “couldn’t be more than an invitation to the man’s work.”

Anchoring the biographical anecdotes are Miller’s many meditations on writing, creativity, and the meaning of life. Among the most poignant is this hand-written “memo to self,” dated 9/17/1918, in which Miller adds to other famous wisdom on the meaning of life:

What are we here for if not to enjoy life eternal, solve what problems we can, give light, peace and joy to our fellow-man, and leave this dear fucked-up planet a little healthier than when we were born.

The book ends with Miller’s grandest reflection on the eternal mystery of the universe, something great minds from Galileo to Montaigne to Neil deGrasse Tyson have pondered. He observes:

No matter what you touch and you wish to know about, you end up in a sea of mystery. You see there’s no beginning or end, you can go back as far as you want, forward as far as you want, but you never got to it, it’s like the essence, it’s that right, it remains. This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it. And it’s meant to be that way, do y’know. And there’s where our reverence should come in. Before everything, the littlest thing as well as the greatest. The tiniest, the horseshit, as well as the angels, do y’know what I mean. It’s all mystery. All impenetrable, as it were, right?

Complement This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn with Miller’s meditations on creative death and the art of living.

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Tolstoy Reads from ‘A Calendar of Wisdom’: Rare 1909 Recording

The beloved Russian author, shortly before his death, on the object of life.

“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan Sontag famously confessed in her collected meditations on love. And yet, one some level, in ways both resolute and subtle, almost all of us are on a constant quest to get better at life.

Last week marked 129 years since Leo Tolstoly conceived of A Calendar of Wisdom — his Tumblr-like compendium of famous thoughts on the meaning of life, which took him twenty years to complete. In this rare audio from 1909, recorded four years after the book was finalized and a year before Tolstoy passed away, the beloved author reads a passage from the book that bespeaks that universal pursuit of self-improvement:

That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

Imbibe some of the wisdom Tolstoy collected in the book, including his own meditations on knowledge and life, here.

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