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

by David Bayles

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.

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.

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with “self-expression” reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium.

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. — Stephen DeStaebler

Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work — for the place their work belongs.

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.

I’m not an artist - I’m a phony I have nothing worth saying I’m not sure what I’m doing Other people are better than I am I’m only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever] I’ve never had a real exhibit No one understands my work No one likes my work I’m no good

Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead.

vision is always ahead of execution,

the first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting — they could go nowhere else.

The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

The blunt truth is, they do precisely what your hands make them do. The paint lays exactly where you put it; the words you wrote — not the ones you needed to write or thought about writing — are the only ones that appear on the paper.

People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous.

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 your own work.

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.

Even at best talent remains a constant, and those who rely upon that gift alone, without developing further, peak quickly and soon fade to obscurity.

What you end up caring about is what you do, not whether the doing came hard or easy.

the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

Ansel Adams, never one to mistake precision for perfection, often recalled the old adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, his point being that if he waited for everything in the scene to be exactly right, he’d probably never make a photograph.

to require perfection is to invite paralysis.

To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary (and universal) humanity, as though you would be better off without it.

Annihilation is an existential fear: the common — but sharply overdrawn — fear that some part of you dies when you stop making art.

Their magic is theirs. You don’t lack it. You don’t need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period.

Hovering out there somewhere between cause and effect, between fears about self and fears about others, lie expectations. Being one of the higher brain functions (as our neocortex modestly calls itself), expectations provide a means to merge imagination with calculation.

Ask your work what it needs, not what you need.

As an artist you’re expected to make each successive piece uniquely new and different — yet reassuringly familiar when set alongside your earlier work. You’re expected to make art that’s intimately (perhaps even painfully) personal - yet alluring and easily grasped by an audience that has likely never known you personally.

artists themselves rarely serve as role models of normalcy.

Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.

risk rejection by exploring new worlds, or court acceptance by following well-explored paths.

the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as your art.

The difference between acceptance and approval is subtle, but distinct. Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like it.

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience.

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.

When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.

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.

We’d all love to squirm out of this one, but the undeniable fact is that your art is not some residue left when you subtract all the things you haven’t done — it is the full payoff for all the things you have done.

When Columbus returned from the New World and proclaimed the earth was round, almost everyone else went right on believing the earth was flat. Then they died — and the next generation grew up believing the world was round. That’s how people change their minds.

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.

But despite its richness and variability, the well-defined world we inherit doesn’t quite fit each one of us, individually. Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples’ worlds — working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment — and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn’t quite ring true.

In a healthy artistic environment, artists are not in competition with each another.

Moreover, what’s important about each new piece is not whether it is better or worse than your previous efforts, but the ways in which it is similar or different.

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” — Howard Ikemoto

education may excel in attracting a first-class artist, but it’s rarely capable of supporting one.

Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas, and remarkable people.

What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third’s a zinger: Was it worth doing?