Grand Rapids Art Prize

From Ran Ortner, winner of the Grand Rapids Art Prize 2009.
“… if I ever encounter a young artist who has any doubts about investing the next ten years of his or her life in his or her work, my advice is always to quit. If you have any capacity to quit whatsoever, most certainly do yourself an enormous favor and quit. If you have no capacity whatsoever to quit, and you’ve tried a million times, in a million different ways, and you still can’t quit, then you know it’s right for you. Look at examples, historically, when art has been forbidden, when people have been incarcerated and had limited capacity—they still found a way. It’s in us and it is of us. You can’t extinguish it. The buoyant aspect of who we are is large and insistent.”