Art & Fear

At some point the need for acceptance may well collide head-on with the need to do your own work… the dilemma seems obvious: risk rejection by exploring new worlds, or court acceptance by following well-explored paths. p. 43

Art & Fear

For the artist, the issue of acceptance begins as one simple, haunting question: When your work is counted, will it be counted as art? It’s a basic question, with antecedents stretching back to childhood… If the need for acceptance is the need to have your work accepted as art, then the accompanying fear is finding it dismissed as craft, hobby, decoration—or as nothing at all. p. 41-42

Art & Fear

In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others… 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. p. 39

Art & Fear

… 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. p. 38

Art & Fear

As an artist you’re expected to make each successive piece uniquely new and different—yet reassuringly familiar when set alongside 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. p. 38

Art & Fear

Art is often made in abandonment, emerging in moments of selfless rapport with the materials and ideas we care about. In such moments we leave no space for others. That’s probably as it should be. Art, after all, rarely emerges from committees. p. 37

Art & Fear

The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly—without judgement, without need of fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child. p. 36

Art & Fear

... if artists share any common view of magic, it is probably the fatalistic suspicion that when their on art turns out well, its a fluke—but when it turns out poorly, its an omen…the important point here is not that you have—or don’t have—what other artists have, but rather that it doesn’t matter. p. 34

Art & Fear

Annihilation is an existential fear: the common—but sharply overdrawn—fear that some part of you dies when you stop making art. And it’s true. Non-artists may not understand that, but artists themselves… understand it all too well. The depth of your need to make things establishes the level of risk in not making them.

… Brett Weston, a virtual case study in annihilation, for decades maintained in his home an ongoing exhibition of a dozen or more of his photographs, none of which was ever more than six months old. p. 32, 33

Art & Fear

If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble. Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.

[Ansel] Adams was right: to require perfection is to invite paralysis. The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work toward what you imagine you can do perfectly. You cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do—away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the work of your heart. You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes. p. 30

Art & Fear

Talent, in common parlance, is “what comes easily.” So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn’t come easily, and—Aha!, it’s just as you feared!

Wrong. By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy that worrying about how much talent you have—and probably no worry more common.

Talent, if it is anything, is a gift, and nothing of the artist’s own making… Plato maintained that all art is a gift from the gods, channeled through artists who are “out of their mind”… p. 26

Art & Fear

The increasing prevalence of reflexive art—art that looks inward, taking itself as its subject—may to some degree simply illustrate attempts by artists to turn this obstacle [myth of the extraordinary] to their advantage. p. 25

Art & Fear

When you act out of fear, your fears come true.

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. p. 23

The fear that you’re only pretending to do art is the (really predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials… Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work. p. 24

Art & Fear

When you act out of fear, your fears come true.

Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others… fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.

The fear that you are only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials.

Fear that you are not a real artists caused you to undervalue your work. p. 23, 24

Art & Fear

Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all—or having gotten there, you may not have said anything. This is probably not a good idea in public speaking, but it’s an excellent idea in making art. p. 20

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. p. 21

Art & Fear

Lesson of 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. p. 15

Art & Fear

Art is a high calling—fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky, and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievement of others—indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don’t, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test. p. 14

Art & Fear

Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all—and for those who do, trouble isn’t long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms:

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

p. 13