Art and Fear
Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
Art and fear. (You may have noticed they go together.) This is a quick-reading (122 pages), witty, real look at the process and challenges of making art. Of course, I think the biggest art project all of us can ever engage in is the creation of our own optimized and actualized lives, so we’ll be focusing on Big Ideas we can apply to our lives today including: quitting vs. stopping, fast vs. slow, 50 lbs, the importance of progress, naive passion vs. informed passion and how to get work done like a PRO!
Big Ideas
- Quitting vs. StoppingKnow the difference.
- Fast and SlowEmbrace the speed of art/life.
- Perfection & 50 lbsFocus on the 50.
- Process + ProgressAre where it’s at.
- PassionNaive vs. Informed.
- Getting Work DoneOver and over again.
- ChoicesA rolling tangle of them.
“This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like; all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people — essentially (statistically speaking) there aren’t any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties artmakers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.
This, then, is a book for the rest of us. Both authors are working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. The observations we make here are drawn from personal experience, and relate more closely to the needs of artists than to the interests of viewers. This book is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.”
~ David Bayles and Ted Orland from Art & Fear
I got this book after reading about a Big Idea from it in Black Box Thinking.
It’s a great addition to our growing collection on creativity that goes nicely with Steven Pressfield’s trilogy and Austin Kleon’s books.
It’s a quick-reading (122 pages), witty, real look at the process and challenges of making art. (Get a copy here.) Of course, I think the biggest art project all of us can ever engage in is the creation of our own optimized and actualized lives, so I’ll be focusing on Big Ideas we can apply to our lives today.
Let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFTo the critic, art is a noun. ...To the artist, art is a verb.
Get the Book
Listen to the PodcastQuitting vs. Stopping
“Virtually all artists encounter such moments. Fear that your next work will fail is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle. It happens all the time: you focus on some new idea in your work, you try it out, run with it for awhile, reach a point of diminishing returns, and eventually decide it’s not worth pursuing further. Writers even have a phrase for it — ‘the pen has run dry — but all media have their equivalents. In the normal artistic cycle this just tells you that you’ve come full circle, back to that point where you need to begin cultivating the next new idea. But in artistic death it marks the last thing that happens: you play out an idea, it stops working, you put the brush down… and thirty years later you confide to someone over coffee that, well, yes, you had wanted to paint when you were much younger. 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.”
Quitting vs. Stopping.
That’s a really important distinction.
First, I can’t read the words “starting again” without hearing (literally) S.N. Goenka in my head saying (in his lyrically Burmese-accented voice), “Start again. Start again.”
That was his primary advice for his students during the 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat I attended years ago. Your mind wanders? Great. Start focusing again. Wanders again? Awesome. Start again.
And again. And again. And again…
That’s meditation. That’s art. That’s life.
Tim Pychyl, one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of procrastination echoes this wisdom in Solving the Procrastination Puzzle where he tells us we need to focus on just getting STARTED rather than “just doing it.”
He says: “Notice we are not using the famous Nike slogan of ‘Just do it!’ It’s about just getting started. The ‘doing it’ will take care of itself once we get going. If we think about ‘just doing it,’ we risk getting overwhelmed with all there is to do. If we just take a first step, that is much easier.
As a strategy, you may find that you have to just get started many times throughout the day, even on the same task. This is common. Even in meditation, we have to gently bring our attention back to our focal point, whatever that may be (e.g., our breath, a mantra). The thing to remember is that just getting started may happen many times in a day.”
It’s ALL ABOUT getting started again. (And again.)
If we don’t get that, we may just give up and quit altogether.
We make a commitment to something (whether that’s a piece of art, a meditation practice, exercising daily or eating more greens or whatever) and then that commitment falters. Fantastic.
Re-commit. Start again. But let’s not quit.
Fast and slow
“A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution. And perhaps surprisingly, the more common obstacle to achieving that correspondence is not undisciplined execution, but undisciplined imagination. It’s altogether too seductive to approach your proposed work believing your materials to be more malleable than they really are, your ideas more compelling, your execution more refined. As Stanley Kunitz once commented, ‘The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.’ And it’s true, most artists don’t daydream about making great art—they daydream about having made great art. What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody—only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.”
This is brilliant —> “The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.”
Swap out the perfect poem or sketch or other piece of art with any aspect of your life and the same issue arises: the problem isn’t that it takes time for these things to come to fruition (of COURSE they do), it’s that we think it should go fast.
That ever happen to you?
More importantly: Is that happening to you RIGHT NOW?
Is there something in your life that’s taking longer than you’d like?
Can you see that your need to have it go from seed to fruit overnight is the source of a lot of problems?
Let’s keep Epictetus’ wisdom in mind. He reminds us that all great things take time. If you tell me you desire a fig, he says, first you must let it blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
And, back to S.N. Goenka and another one of his phrases that is permanently etched into my mind: “Work diligently. Diligently. Work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently. And you’re bound to be successful. BOUND to be successful.”
Perfection + 50 pounds of clay
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on the quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of pots rated an ‘A,’ forty pounds a ‘B,’ and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality,’ however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an ‘A.’ Well, came grading and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
This is the Idea Matthew Syed shared in Black Box Thinking that led me to get this book.
Genius.
How do YOU grade yourself?
Do you need to be perfect or do you need to show up and put in the effort?
Of course, we all want to produce great things we’re proud of. But, paradoxically, by forcing ourselves to be perfect we’re hurting the cause. We’d be much better off holding the high standards and then simply getting to work—knowing that the process of engaging with life will help us optimize over time.
As Maslow says, “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
Remember the 50 pounds of pots.
ESPECIALLY when you feel that you/your work just isn’t quite good enough.
Process + Progress
“The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts—namely, whether or not you’re making progress in your work. 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.”
As you can glean by this point, a huge part of the book is about engaging in the PROCESS of making art. The product is the by-product of that process.
Of course, the world doesn’t see the process, they only see the product—which puts them in a position where it’s easy to miss the most important thing for us, the creators of our optimal lives: are we making PROGRESS?!
<— THAT is the relevant question.
This whole idea reminds me of Robert Greene’s wisdom on the apprentice phase in his classic book, Mastery (see Notes), where he tells us: “The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery. You enter a career as an outsider. You are naïve and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience. Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world represented by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end, you will master yourself and all of your weaknesses.”
In Greene’s model of Mastery, the Apprentice Phase is a vital step in the process.
This attitude of constantly striving to master ourselves and transform our consciousness is vital to ALL phases of the process. Of course, we need to engage with the world in a powerful manner. But the ultimate standard should always be: Are we making progress?
Spotlight on YOU: How are you currently making progress?
How can you celebrate that progress?
And, how can you make a 5% improvement in your life?
Let’s sentence-stem completion that question.
I can make a 5% improvement in my life by:
- _________________________________________
- _________________________________________
- _________________________________________
- _________________________________________
- _________________________________________
Awesome. To process + progress!!
Naive passion vs. Informed passion
“In the ideal — that is to say, real — artist, fears not only continue to exist, they exist side by side with the desires that complement them, perhaps drive them, certainly feed them. 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.”
Naive passion vs. informed passion.
Naive passion ignores obstacles. It’s fantastic creative fuel—right up until that first obstacle, when everything falls apart. (Hah.)
Informed passion exists on the other side of that naivete—where we KNOW there will be obstacles and we KNOW we have what it takes to move past them.
That takes COURAGE. (And, confidence in the deepest sense of the word: Trusting yourself.)
It’s basically the difference between Steven Pressfield’s amateur and Pro.
The amateur creates when she feels like it and when it’s all flowing the way she thinks good art should. The Pro shows up with her lunch pail whether she *feels* like it or not—knowing that obstacles are inherently part of the process.
In the words of Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs.”
Here’s to informed passion in the face of inevitable obstacles!
Getting work done over and over
“Only the maker (and then only with time) has a chance of knowing how important small conventions and rituals are in the practice of staying at work. 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. Hemingway, for instance, mounted his typewriter at counter-height and did all his writing while standing up. If he wasn’t standing, he wasn’t typing. Of course that odd habit isn’t visible in his stories — but were he denied that habit, there probably wouldn’t be any stories.
The hardest part in 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.”
It’s impossible to talk about dealing with art and fear without talking about rituals and routines—the stuff that gives us the structure and consistency and confidence to consistently enter the unknown just on the other side of our comfort zone.
Pressfield’s trilogy of The War of Art + Do the Work + Turning Pro is, essentially, ALL ABOUT creating the rituals and rhythms of a Pro such that you can show up consistently.
In The War of Art Pressfield tells us: “Why have I stressed professionalism so heavily in the preceding chapters? Because the most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
In Turning Pro, he tells us: “What is a practice anyway? To ‘have a practice’ in yoga, say, or tai chi, or calligraphy, is to follow a rigorous, prescribed regimen with the intention of elevating the mind and the spirit to a higher level.
A practice implies engagement in a ritual. A practice may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will, and focused intention aimed, on one level, at the achievement of mastery in a field but, on a loftier level, intended to produce a communion with a power greater than ourselves—call it whatever you like: God, mind, soul, Self, the Muse, the superconscious.”
What are YOUR key practices that help you create day after day after day?
Let’s know them and live them.
P.S. Remember: “The hardest part in 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.”
P.P.S. Another gem worth remembering, this one from Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
A rolling tangle of choices
“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. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.”
Well, that makes it clear.
We can choose to engage in the art that is our lives (and/or makes up our lives), give it our best shot and risk that it will not make us happy.
Or…
We can choose to not give it our best shot and, thereby, GUARANTEE that it will not make us happy (as we numb ourselves from that pain with all sorts of distractions). :)
Maslow comes to mind again. This gem is always worth repeating: “If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.”
About the authors
