Art and Fear Quotes

“Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“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. 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.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“It's easier to paint the angel's feet to another masterwork than to discover where the angels live within yourself.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE ART might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“But while you may feel you're pretending that you're an artist, there's no way to pretend you're making art. Go ahead, try writing a story while pretending you're writing a story. Not possible.”
― david bayles, Art and Fear

“Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Designer Charles Eames, arguably the quintessential Renaissance Man of the twentieth century, used to complain good-naturedly that he devoted only about one percent of his energy to conceiving a design--and the remaining ninety-nine percent holding onto it as a project ran its course. Small surprise. After all, your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute--but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light. What”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“It’s a simple premise: follow the leads that arise from contact with the work itself, and your technical, emotional and intellectual pathway becomes clear.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“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. A”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“But is the Mona Lisa really art? Well then, what about an undetectably perfect copy of the Mona Lisa? That comparison (however sneaky) points up the fact that it’s surprisingly difficult, maybe even impossible, to view any single work in isolation and rule definitively, “This is art” or “This is craft.” Striking that difference means comparing successive pieces made by the same person. In”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“There were counter-protests, of course, and in the end Mapplethorpe’s work was exhibited, but the message to the arts community was clear: stray too far from the innocuous, and the axe would fall. Call it selective censorship: freedom of expression was guaranteed unless it was expressed in a work of art. The most amazing aspect of this American morality play was not that the government would place self-interest above principle when it felt threatened, but that no one foresaw this coming from miles down the road. A reminder from history: the American Revolution was not financed with matching Grants from the Crown. COMMON”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so. Once you have found the work you are meant to do, the particulars of any single piece don’t matter all that much.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE ART might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. It’s a genuine tragedy. Worse yet, it’s an unnecessary tragedy. After all, artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience.”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“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?”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“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!”
― David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“It’s easier to paint in the angel’s feet to another’s master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself...Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“The human race has spent several millennia developing a huge and robust set of observations about the world, in forms as varied as language, art and religion. Those observations in turn have withstood many — enormously many — tests. We stand heir to an unstatably large set of meanings. Most of what we inherit is so clearly correct it goes unseen. It fits the world seamlessly. It is the world. 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. And so you make your place in the world by making part of it — by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“And when the work is going well, why on earth would we want to know? Most of the myriad of steps that go into making a piece (or a year’s worth of pieces) go on below the level of conscious thought, engaging unarticulated beliefs and assumptions about what artmaking is...We rarely think about how or why we do such things — we just do them. Changing the pattern of outcome in your work means first identifying things about your approach that are as automatic as wedging the clay, as subtle as releasing the arrow from the bow.

...We use predictable work habits to get us into the studio and into our materials; we use recurrent bits of form as starting points for making specific pieces.

....The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons...any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.
....The private details of artmaking are utterly uninteresting to audiences (and frequently to teachers), perhaps because they’re almost never visible — or even knowable — from examining the finished work.

....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. Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker....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...they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles “appropriated” from other places and times.

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.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“After all, the world does (in large measure) reward authentic work. The problem is not absolute, but temporal: by the time your reward arrives, you may no longer be around to collect it....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.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“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....

On both intellectual and technical grounds, it’s wise to remain on good terms with your artistic heritage, lest you devote several incarnations to re-inventing the wheel. But once having allowed for that, the far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future....

The unfolding over time of a great idea is like the growth of a fractal crystal, allowing details and refinements to multiply endlessly — but only in ever-decreasing scale. Eventually (perhaps by the early 1960’s) those who stepped forward to carry the West Coast Landscape Photography banner were not producing art, so much as re-producing the history of art....

Only those who commit to following their own artistic path can look back and see this issue in clear perspective: the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as ”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“After all, wanting to be understood is a basic need — an affirmation of the humanity you share with everyone around you. The risk is fearsome: in making your real work you hand the audience the power to deny the understanding you seek; you hand them the power to say, “you’re not like us; you’re weird; you’re crazy.” And admittedly, there’s always a chance they may be right — your work may provide clear evidence that you are different, that you are alone. After all, artists themselves rarely serve as role models of normalcy....

Just how unintelligible your art — or you — appear to others may be something you don’t really want to confront, at least not all that quickly. What is sometimes needed is simply an insulating period, a gap of pure time between the making of your art, and the time when you share it with outsiders. Andrew Wyeth pursued his Helga series privately for years, working at his own pace, away from the spotlight of criticism and suggestion that would otherwise have accompanied the release of each new piece in the series. Such respites also, perhaps, allow the finished work time to find its rightful place in the artist’s heart and mind — in short, a chance to be understood better by the maker. Then when the time comes for others to judge the work, their reaction (whatever it may be) is less threatening.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“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.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear