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Personally, we’ll side with Conrad’s view of fatalism: namely, that it is a species of fear — the fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak.
But while talent — not to mention fate, luck and tragedy — all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis.
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.
Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.
ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It’s difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn’t need to make art.
If art is made by ordinary people, then you’d have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess. This is a giant hint about art, because it suggests that our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to our getting work done, are a source of strength as well. Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.
The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.
The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.
In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. “Artist” has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all!
Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue — or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.
Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again — and art is all about starting again.
Art is a high calling — fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others — indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don’t, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.
Consider the story of the young student — well, David Bayles, to be exact — who began piano studies with a Master. After a few months’ practice, David lamented to his teacher, “But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers.” To which the Master replied, “What makes you think that ever changes?” That’s why they’re called Masters. When he raised David’s discovery from an expression of self-doubt to a simple observation of reality, uncertainty became an asset. Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution — and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and
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Imagination is in control when you begin making an object. The artwork’s potential is never higher than in that magic moment when the first brushstroke is applied, the first chord struck. But as the piece grows, technique and craft take over, and imagination becomes a less useful tool. A piece grows by becoming specific.
The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one — and only one — possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.
most artists don’t daydream about making great art — they daydream about having made great art.
The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.
Clearly something’s come unbalanced here. After all, if there were some ongoing redefinition of “what chess is”, you’d probably feel a little uneasy trying to play chess.
You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn’t very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren’t yours. It’s
There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have — and probably no worry more common.
So when you ask, “Then why doesn’t it come easily for me?”, the answer is probably, “Because making art is hard!” What you end up caring about is what you do, not whether the doing came hard or easy.
The belief that “real” art possesses some indefinable magic ingredient puts pressure on you to prove your work contains the same. Wrong, very wrong. Asking your work to prove anything only invites doom. Besides, if artists share any common view of magic, it is probably the fatalistic suspicion that when their own art turns out well, it’s a fluke-but when it turns out poorly, it’s an omen.
But the important point here is not that you have — or don’t have — what other artists have, but rather that it doesn’t matter. Whatever they have is something needed to do their work — it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don’t lack it. You don’t need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period.
Conversely, expectations based on the work itself are the most useful tool the artist possesses. What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. The best information about what you love is in your last contact with what you love.
Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.
We carry real and imagined critics with us constantly — a veritable babble of voices, some remembered, some prophesied, and each eager to comment on all we do.
As Ben Shahn rather wryly commented, “It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.”
at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.
They’re in a good position to comment on how they’re moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.
Naive passion, which promotes work done in ignorance of obstacles, becomes — with courage — informed passion, which promotes work done in full acceptance of those obstacles.
As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand — yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion — to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place.
If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment.
Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists — people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a german shepherd at a hundred feet — casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.
One of the best kept secrets of artmaking is that new ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas — ideas that can be re-used for a thousand variations, supplying the framework for a whole body of work rather than a single piece.
Simply put, what you did got you here, and if you apply the same methods again you will likely get the same result again. This is true not just for being stuck, but for all other artistic states as well - including highly productive states. As a practical matter, ideas and methods that work usually continue to work. If you were working smoothly and now you are stuck, chances are you unnecessarily altered some approach that was already working perfectly well.
For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.
The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over — and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns.
If nothing else it’s hard to claim victory when your imagined competitors may be entirely unaware of your existence — after all, some may have already been dead for a century. Quite plausibly they don’t win, while you — sooner or later — will lose. In some forms of comparison, defeat is all but inevitable.
In healthy times you rarely pause to distinguish between internal drive, sense of craft, the pressure of a deadline or the charm of a new idea — they all serve as sources of energy in the pieces you make.
This impasse may be what led Ezra Pound to remark that the one thing he learned from viewing a good piece of art was that the other artist had done his job well, and thus he [Pound] was freed to explore another direction.
Art that falls short often does so not because the artist failed to meet the challenge, but because there was never a challenge there in the first place.
The burden for the artist, as Anne Truitt observes in her Daybook, is that “The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin the work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.”
Compared to other challenges, the ultimate shortcoming of technical problems is not that they’re hard, but that they’re easy.
Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.
In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there’s a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished — but more innovative — than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos — demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship — are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments.
At any point along that path, your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits — without being trapped by it. The trap is perfection: unless your work continually generates new and unresolved issues, there’s no reason for your next work to be any different from the last.
Old work tells you what you were paying attention to then; new work comments on the old by pointing out what you were not previously paying attention to.
Indulge too many habits, and life sinks into mind-dulling routine. Too few, and coping with a relentless stream of incoming detail overwhelms you (much as users of certain psychotropic drugs become mesmerized once they notice that every blade of grass is growing.) It’s all a matter of balance, and making art helps achieve that balance. For the artist, a sketchpad or a notebook is a license to explore — it becomes entirely acceptable to stand there, for minutes on end, staring at a tree stump.
Most early work, in fact, only hints at the themes and gestures that will — if the potential isn’t squandered — emerge as the artist’s characteristic signature in later, mature work. At the outset, however, chances are that whatever theme and technique attract you, someone has already experimented in the same direction. This is unavoidable : making any art piece inevitably engages the large themes and basic techniques that artists have used for centuries. Finding your own work is a process of distilling from each those traces that ring true to your own spirit.
Viewed closely, however, style is not a virtue, it is an inevitability — the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times.
