Creativity Quote by Jack Levine

"Impulses are hard to come by these days" lands like a complaint and a diagnosis. Coming from Jack Levine, a painter who built a career skewering American power with satiric, crowded canvases, it reads less like nostalgia for spontaneity than suspicion about what modern life has done to our nerve endings. Impulse here isn’t mere whim; it’s the raw, unfiltered spark that makes an image dangerous, a gesture unplanned, a conscience loud.

Levine lived through the decades when institutions learned to professionalize everything: politics, advertising, culture, even dissent. In that world, impulses don’t disappear naturally; they get managed. You learn to self-edit before you speak, brand before you make, calculate before you feel. The line hints at a society that’s over-counseled and under-stirred, where risk is treated as a defect. It’s a sly inversion of the usual moralizing. We’re taught impulses are what civilized people overcome. Levine implies the opposite: losing them is the real impoverishment.

There’s an artist’s lament inside it, too. Painting thrives on decisions made faster than language, on an instinctive commitment to a mark before it can be justified. If impulses are scarce, art becomes committee work: careful, correct, dead on arrival. The sentence is also a wink at the viewer. If you’re not feeling impulses, maybe you’re being trained not to. And if that’s true, then recovering impulse becomes a political act as much as an aesthetic one.