An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.
Interpretation
Discipline is essential for artists, enabling them to freely express their creativity within chosen boundaries.
Wayne Thiebaud's quote highlights the crucial relationship between discipline and freedom in artistic endeavors. Unlike a general approach to training responses, artists must rigorously cultivate their skills, akin to a mathematician's discipline. This process of training equips artists to make informed choices about their creative boundaries, transforming discipline from a mere constraint into a powerful tool that allows for greater artistic expression and freedom.
In practice
In a workshop on art techniques, this quote can inspire artists to embrace the discipline required for mastery.
My subject matter was a genuine sort of experience that came out of my life, particularly the American world in which I was privileged to be . . . . I would really think of the bakery counters, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience. From when I worked in restaurants . . . [it was] always poetic to me.
Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.
You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.
Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don't think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.
All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.
I was this young boy and I saw this man with his hands round my sister's neck, I was just standing there with her two children beside me... Everything I've done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naïve. And so, when everyone started saying I was a misogynist, that really freaked me out. They didn't know me. They didn't know what I had seen in my life. That was the first part of fashion that I hated - people labeling me without knowing me.
You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
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