Brion Gysin

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. -Socrates

I know it must seem adolescent and perhaps somewhat silly to quote from Socrates (and even then this is only what Plato says he said), but really this quote seems so important to me primarily because it is only from looking at and studying other artists that I have gained any confidence in my own work.

And yes of course there comes occasionally the awful realization that something I've done looks like some else's work, and ironically, I never know of their work until shortly after I've done my own.  And this is not so uncommon at all.

I did a small series of paintings once that I named after book I loved called "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by Amos Tutuola.  And I wrote that right on the face of a couple of them.  Only three months later my brother said -Oh man, they're gonna think you took this from Eno, as Eno's newly announced album had the same title.  I just said -oh well, that's the way it goes.  Funnily, neither he nor Bowie had even read the book.  But I loved the album when it came out, it made me feel proud of my clever "advanced theft".

And Brion Gysin had the critics telling him he got his ideas from Mark Tobey, a great artist, but one he had never had the pleasure to see at the time.  And there is Mark Twain's quote  where he says that every thing he had ever said he was able to find in other's work.  It just happens.  Wow, I just spent a couple of minutes with Gysin's work online.  I realize I hadn't seen it before.  And I like it. A bunch.