Art and Fear

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of an artist? Truths are spoken in the book Art & Fear which may be universal to artists. These are the statements that resonate most with me. Please feel free to respond with your own thoughts and ideas to Ruth@SollerOriginals.com. Excerpts from the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland copyright 1993.

•Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. P 2
•In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive. P 3
•And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work—for the place their work belongs. P 10
•Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution—and it should be.P 15
•Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding. P 21
•When you act out of fear, your fears come true. Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others. In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing you own work. P 23
•The fear that you’re only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. P 24
•By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work.
P 26 (I truly love this idea!)
•Yet this humanity is the ultimate source of your work; your perfectionism denies you the very thing you need to get your work done. P 31
•We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance, and approval we seek. P38
•In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others. At least not immediately, and not to a wide audience. P 39
•In time, as an artist’s gestures become more assured, the chosen tools become almost an extension of the artist’s own spirit. In time, exploration gives way to expression. P 59
• To the artist, all problems of art appear uniquely personal. Well, that’s understandable enough, given that not many other activities routinely call one’s basic self-worth into question. P 65
•Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. P 68
•And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. P 69
•Fear that you’re not getting your fair share of recognition leads to anger and bitterness. Fear that you’re not as good as a fellow artist leads to depression. P 72
•--art has the dubious distinction of being one profession in which you routinely make more my teaching it than by doing it. P 81
•Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas, and remarkable people. P 84
•Once developed, art habits are deep-seated, reliable, helpful, and convenient. Moreover, habits are stylistically important. In a sense, habits are style. P 103
•And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art. P 104
•Over the long run, the people with the interesting answers are those who ask the interesting questions. P 113
•To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. P 117 (Amen)