Art and Fear (book summary)

Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking By David Bayles and Ted Orland

PART I

I. THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.
ARTMAKING INVOLVES SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED.
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
ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE.
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.
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.
The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about — and lots of it!

II. ART AND FEAR

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.
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.
Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently.
your desire to make art — beautiful or meaningful or emotive art — is integral to your sense of who you are.
Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.
What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don’t, quit.
Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution — and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.
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.
Many fiction writers, for instance, discover early on that making detailed plot outlines is an exercise in futility; as actual writing progresses, characters increasingly take on a life of their own, sometimes to the point that the writer is as surprised as the eventual reader by what their creations say and do.
People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What’s really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way. Simply put, making art is chancy — it doesn’t mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

III. FEARS ABOUT YOURSELF

Your work may not be what curators want to exhibit or publishers want to publish, but those are different issues entirely. 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 called feedback, and it’s the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It’s also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you’re the closest person around.
By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work.
to require perfection is to invite paralysis.
You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes.
To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary (and universal) humanity,
the seed for your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.
Asking your work to prove anything only invites doom.

IV. FEARS ABOUT OTHERS

But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?
catering to fears of being misunderstood leaves you dependent upon your audience.
Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.
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 real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as your art.
courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience.
The only pure communication is between you and your work.

V. FINDING YOUR WORK

Between the initial idea and the finished piece lies a gulf we can see across, but never fully chart.
the art you can make is irrevocably bound to the times and places of your life.
we don’t learn much about making art from being moved by it. Making art is bound by where we are, and the experience of art we have as viewers is not a reliable guide to where we are.
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.
You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work.
If you’re like most artists we know, you’re probably accustomed to watching your work unfold smoothly enough for long stretches of time, until one day — for no immediately apparent reason — it doesn’t. Hitting that unexpected rift is commonplace to the point of cliche, yet artists commonly treat each recurring instance as somber evidence of their own personal failure.
new ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas
fear that you’ve been following the wrong ideas is merely the downside variant of common fantasies about the way things could have been.
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.
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,
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.
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.

PART II

VI. A VIEW INTO THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Finding your place in the art world is no easy matter, if indeed there is a place for you at all.
The urge to compete provides a source of raw energy, and for that purpose alone it can be exceptionally useful. In a healthy artistic environment, that energy is directed inward to fulfill one’s own potential.
It’s easier to rate artists in terms of the recognition they’ve received (which is easily compared) than in terms of the pieces they’ve made (which may be as different as apples and waltzes.)
In not knowing how to tell yourself that your work is OK, you may be driven to the top of the heap in trying to get the rest of the world to tell you.
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. The meaningful comparison between two Bach fugues is not how they rank, but how they work.
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.

VII. THE ACADEMIC WORLD

The greatest gift you have to offer your students is the example of your own life as a working artist
What good teachers offer their students is something akin to the vulnerability found in a personal relationship — a kind of artistic and intellectual intimacy that lets others see how they reached a specific point, not simply that they did reach it.
Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas, and remarkable people.
The discouraging truth is that the rest of the world neither cares whether you make art, nor has much interest in buying it if you do.
(Jerry Uelsmann refers to coaxing art from graduate students as a process of “rehabilitating the over-educated”!)
The security of a monthly paycheck mixes poorly with the risk-taking of artistic inquiry.
Nothing really useful can be learned from viewing finished art. At least nothing other artists can usefully apply in making their own art.
A finished piece gives precious few clues as to any questions the artist weighed while making the object.

VIII. CONCEPTUAL WORLDS

Think of it like Olympic diving: you don’t win high points for making even the perfect swan dive off the low board. There’s little reward in an easy perfection quickly reached by many.
Compared to other challenges, the ultimate shortcoming of technical problems is not that they’re hard, but that they’re easy.
while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it’s still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal — a “right answer” — than to give form to a new idea.
Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.
art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves.
art is less polished — but more innovative — than craft.
New work is supposed to replace old work. If it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete — well, that’s life.
Our understanding of the past is altered by our experiences in the present.
It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self.
Making art depends upon noticing things — things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter.
Viewed over a span of years, changes in one’s art often reveal a curious pattern, swinging irregularly between long periods of quiet refinement, and occasional leaps of runaway change.

IX. THE HUMAN VOICE

Answers are reassuring, but when you’re onto something really useful, it will probably take the form of a question.
Over the long run, the people with the interesting answers are those who ask the interesting questions.
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.
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.

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