Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

by David Bayles

Style is not an aspect of good work, it is an aspect of all work. Style is the natural consequence of habit.

Where the scientist asks what equation would best describe the trajectory of an airborne rock, the artist asks what it would feel like to throw one.

This creates a certain paradox, for while good art carries a ring of truth to it — a sense that something permanently important about the world has been made clear — the act of giving form to that truth is arguably unique to one person, and one time.

There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will not ever be.

As Tennessee Williams observed, even works of demonstrable fiction or fantasy remain emotionally autobiographical.

It may in fact be the engagement — not the art — that you seek. The difference is that making art allows, indeed guarantees, that you declare yourself. Art is contact, and your work necessarily reveals the nature of that contact. In making art you declare what is important.

Recently a painter of some accomplishment (but as insecure as the rest of us) was discussing his previous night’s dream with a friend over coffee. It was one of those vivid technicolor dreams, the kind that linger on in exact detail even after waking. In his dream he found himself at an art gallery, and when he walked inside and looked around he found the walls hung with paintings — amazing paintings, paintings of passionate intensity and haunting beauty. Recounting his dream, the artist ended fervently with, “I’d give anything to be able to make paintings like that!” “Wait a minute!” his friend exclaimed. “Don’t you see? Those were your paintings! They came from your own mind. Who else could have painted them?”

We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in — and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing — the only work you can do convincingly — is the work that focuses on the things you care about.

Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

Simply put, artists learn how to proceed, or they don’t.

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot — and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy.