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We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform.
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As quoted in "New York at Work; Puppeteer Creates Shows for Grown-Ups" by N. R. Kleinfield The New York Times (2 July 1991)

 

Julie Taymor

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Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence. Certainly the state of simplicity and humility is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative. Stripped of almost everything that I had considered desirable and necessary, I began to try. Writing, which had meant the practice of an art by a polished mind in civilised surroundings, became a struggle to create completely fresh forms out of the rocks and sticks of words. I began to see things for the first time. Even the boredom and frustration presented avenues for endless exploration; even the ugliness, the bags and iron of Australian life, acquired a meaning. As for the cat's cradle of human intercourse, this was necessarily simplified, often bungled, sometimes touching. Its very tentativeness can be reward. There is always the possibility that the book lent, the record played, may lead to communication between human beings. There is the possibility that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding.
These, then, are some of the reasons why an expatriate has stayed, in the face of those disappointments which follow inevitably upon his return.

 

Patrick (Australian novelist) White

 

In his effort toward revivification of this sense [the sense for great art], the modern artist has not infrequently retired into himself; he has accepted isolation or even alienation. … Sometimes the good has to go underground. … The “revolutionary” artist … has had the aim of saving himself from the surrounding forces of sentimentality and vulgarity. … It is impossible to make a deal with these forces, and we should not be surprised if in striking back the artist has done so in ways even intended to be offensive. He has sometimes shown defiance and contempt toward those who would deny his level of seriousness.

 

Richard Weaver

 

A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.

 

John Fowles

 

Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment.

 

Margaret Mead

 

All of us have an artist inside us. It's part of our DNA as human beings. We have all witnessed the power of the arts to deeply connect people, to open our minds to new ideas and express our innermost sacred selves. The imagination isn't just simply reserved for children. The imagination can be, for all of us, a very real gateway to joy, understanding, liberation and peace.

 

Jennifer Beals