People From Saskatchewan

"During 1968, more than forty-four hundred companies disappeared by mergers involving an estimated $43 billion in securities—an all-time record. In this tidal wave of mergers, which subsequently crested and receded, conglomerate firms accounted for either a substantial or a preponderant fraction, depending upon the definition of ‘conglomerate’ adopted."

"The 4,400 business corporations that disappeared by merger during 1968 were a small number compared with the 12,000 that disappeared by failure, or the 207,000 new corporations that were formed. Even the $43 billion in securities exchanged in mergers that year were only 3.3 percent of the market value of corporate securities."

"A fourth factor underlying the merger wave of the 1960’s was the steep rise in the load of corporate income taxation since World War II. In 1940, the effective federal corporate income-tax rate was 27 percent; in 1968, it was 50 percent. Rates of state and local taxes on business incomes have risen commensurately."

"Because some conglomerate, and other, mergers have proved to be unsound and failed. It has been proposed that government should prohibit such mergers. But there is no feasible way to identify bad mergers in advanced; only time and the test of market competition reveal them."

"Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous…"

"I annoy everybody, not just certain women…I think it is because I'm not interested in the group, only in the individual. What happens is my message enters the conflicted person reading it who is half self, half society but does not know where one begins and the other ends. I light up that conflict and it makes people angry."

"A journalist recently told me that she had been sent to find out who I was. [...] There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it."

"I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does."

"I can't even remember Saving Agnes. I haven't read it in years and years. I don’t think I could read it. It's a strange thing about having been publishing for so long. As with any memory of yourself at twenty-five, it feels like your cellular being has completely changed. It's not just photographs of me with a weird hairstyle at twenty-five—a novel is such an intricate document."

"I could almost divide my life on either side of this line, between the things that are real and the things that are imitating reality and are synthetic or inauthentic, and the awful pain of being in the synthetic life or the synthetic relationship, the one that is a bit like the thing you want but is not it. So that was that book."

"Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband [[w:Adrian Clarke (photographer)|Adrian] Clarke]], whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids. She pours scorn on his "dependence" and "unwaged domesticity", but won't do chores herself because they make her feel, of all things, "unsexed". She is horrified when he demands half of every­thing in the divorce: "They’re my children," she snarls. "They belong to me.""

"It takes time, see. You finish painting the painting and then you turn it to the wall. I mean, you say, does it have it or doesn't it have it? If it doesn't have it, you throw it away, but if you think it has it, you turn it to the wall. And then when you have made some more work, then you turn them all over. And you, again, try to see exactly what it does mean and just exactly how effectively you have rendered this meaning."

"To neglect your own mind, that's like to neglect your consciousness. That’s like to give up all hope of joy and happiness, really. You're the only one that can discover for you the meaning of anything. What it means to you. By that, I don't mean intellectual meaning. I mean, what it means, how it makes you feel. You have to see whether you really are happy or not. Whether you really are sad or not. And you have to investigate what goes through your mind."

"Inspiration comes from a clear mind. Right straight through. We have nothing to do with it."

"To live truly and effectively the idea of achievement must be given up. Put unsentimental piety first, turn your back on the world, and get on with it."

"It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work."

"When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We respond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees.. .The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work."

"When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision."

"When we realize that we can see life we gradually give up the things that stand in the way of our complete awareness. As we paint we move along step by step. We realize that we are guided in our work by awareness of life."

"You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting."

"Some things fail and others succeed. Well, then you get quite desperate, and you think: 'I am going to work and work and I'm not going to have any failures.' But then you find out that failures are inevitable; you can't even draw a straight line, you know that."

"When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is in the mind, not in the eye. In our minds, we have an awareness of perfection that leads us on.. .The response to beauty is emotion. Sometimes very subtle emotions of which we are almost not aware, and sometimes our most powerful emotions.."

"Beauty is very much broader than just to the eye. It is our whole, positive response to life. An artist is fortunate in that his work is the inner contemplation of beauty, of perfection in life. We cannot make anything perfectly, but with inner contemplation of perfection, we can suggest it."

"Although we are all different, we all respond to each other's suggestions of perfection. And we enjoy the same response as the artist. It is the inner contemplation, the wanting to respond to life, that opens our eyes to what is already in the mind."

"Everything is contemplated in the mind without meditation. We make a very complicated response. Just to look at a floating branch evokes very complicated objective and nonobjective responses. The artist must slow all this down, mentally. It is this mental experience that makes the representation of beauty possible."

"In the middle of the work of art, an artist often feels that he is failing. And he starts interfering with his inspiration. That is a mistake. The mistake. It is best to push on through. Such works frequently turn out to be the best. To fail is a very ordinary experience for an artist. To fail and fail and still go on, marks his character. Most people cannot bear to fail, even once. They think of security."

"Take beauty: it's a very mysterious thing, isn't it? I think it's a response in our minds to perfection.. .My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines. There's not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think."

"Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy."

"The Minimalists were nonobjective. They just recorded beauty, I guess, without the emotions - or at least without personal emotions. My work is a little more emotional than that."

"[about Ad Reinhardt:] ..we supported each other.. .He thought I was a good painter, and I thought he was a good painter."

"The little rectangle contradicts the square. And the square is authoritative.. .The rectangle is pleasant, whereas the square is not.. ..It's too stiff, too authoritative. My paintings are made up of little rectangles, not little squares There was a scholar who dug up a Tantric drawing that was just like my grid, and it was made of rectangles, too, just exactly like mine.. .I was surprised. I didn't think anybody had made a grid quite like that."

"Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. That's the end [of the interview]."

"I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky.. .I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don't repeat. And I don't think life does either. It's continually various. That's the truth about life."

"It was so flat, you know, you could see the curves of the earth. And when a train came into vision at nine o'clock in the morning, it was still leaving at noon.. ..it took that long to get across the prairie."

"I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life.. ..victory after victory, [laughing..] Well, I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother. Half of my victories fell to the ground.. [she pauses] ..My mother had victories. [her candid, weather-beaten face darkens abruptly]"

"There's no indication or hint about the material world in my painting. No, I don't paint about the world. Everybody else is painting about the world. That's enough."

"I am simply painting concrete representation of abstract emotions such as innocent love, ordinary happiness. I do want an emotional response. And I paint about emotions, not about lines. The truth is that it's not the lines that express the emotion. It's the scale of the composition. You know, if you go into a room that has perfect scale, you feel it.. .If the painting has perfect scale, it moves you. And you have different scale to show different emotions. It's the space between the lines that counts."

"I painted for 20 years without liking them very much, you know. I burnt them at the end of every year. For 20 years I burnt the whole bunch because I didn't want them to get in the market. And well, sometimes when I was starving, I used to sell one cheap, you know. But I always regretted it because you hate to think of a painting in somebody's house that you don't like well enough, you know."

"The truth is that I have lived on an even keel. I don't go down, and I don't go up. I believe in living above the line. Above the line is happiness and love, you know. Below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness. And I don't go down below the line for anything."

"Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger.. ..Her paintings exert themselves differently, depending on their line, their pattern, and the quality of the ground color on the canvas. Some are less lyrical, evincing aggression or tension.. .Others suggest spaciousness or vast space, again without using illusionistic devices or the egotistical implication of infinitely extensible surface."

"Agnes Martin often speaks of joy; she sees it as the desired condition of all life. Who would disagree with her?.. ..No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed. The work awes, not just with its delicacy, but with its vigor, and this power and visual interest is something that has to be experienced."

"[looking at the facture of her works is] a conceptual traffic jam: sheer undesirability. My analytical faculties, after trying to conclude what I'm looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses."

"[Agnes] Martin also often spoke in her writings of a blissful, egoless state, an 'untroubled mind', which she tried to achieve in her art, an idea that stems from her own interests in Eastern philosophy. Martin first encountered Buddhism in the late 1950's in the lectures of D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University, and also became interested in the writing of two Taoists, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, who advised that, rather than looking at others, one should look within one's own mind and soul."

"If what counts most in communication is pattern and its variations, we can look again at the many surfaces and repetitions in Martin's work: in format, medium, mark, measurement. The square itself, as the artist well knew, is the most repetitious of linear lay-outs; each defining dimension repeats the next. That's why she used the square for her basic setup, as well as why she famously credited it with an 'unpleasant' power, which she actively opposed by dividing her canvas into rectangular units."

"I was interested in geometry. And in the colors of nature. Remember, I learned from Agnes Martin and [fiber artist] Lenore Tawney. It was just gardening, making a quilt."

"Over the years, she gave an assortment of reasons for her departure in the Summer of 1967. She had been living in a beautiful studio on South Street, with cathedral ceilings, so close to the river that she could clearly see the expressions on the sailors' faces. One day, she heard that it was going to be torn down. In the same post she received notification that she had won a grant, enough to purchase a pickup truck and an Airstream camper. Her friend Ad Reinhardt, whose black paintings she loved, had just died; her relationship with Chryssa had ended, and anyway she'd had enough of living in the city. The voices [in her head], too, were in agreement. 'I could no longer stay, so I had to leave, you see,' she explained decades later. 'I left New York because every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.'"

"I would like to somewhat dispel this impression that she [agnes Martin] was some ascetic saint of the desert. She was more complicated than that and more sophisticated than that. I'm leery of sweeping her up in this celebration of artists, these artists who are self-trained or outsider, or beyond the pale of cosmopolitan art and life, and that's their merit. I think her mental illness [schizophrenia] is liable to enforce that impulse and I think that would be a mistake. It's not who she was. It was part of her life, but it didn't define her."

"I painted a painting called 'Milk River' [in 1963] Cows don't give milk if they don't have grass and water Tremendous meaning of that is that painters can't give anything to the observer People get what they need from a painting The painter need not die because of responsibility When you have inspiration and represent inspiration The observer makes the painting"

"My work is anti-nature The four-story mountain You will not think form, space, line, contour Just a suggestion of nature gives weight light and heavy light like a feather you get light enough and you levitate"

"People think that painting is about color It's mostly composition It's composition that's the whole thing The classic image- Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image, one empty – the empty form goes all the way to heaven It is the classic form – lighter weight."