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[Cindi Mayweather]

...And I've only read half of it so far. I got it last night and I could have read all of it in one sitting if not for the fact that I was exhausted and needed to go to sleep. Granted, it's a 100 something page book so that's not hard to do but it's so engrossing, I'm telling you.

I was suggested that I read this book at the behest of my art instructor and mentor. The Amazon reviews made it seem amazing but actually reading it spoke to me in ways other books simply have not.

If you're an artist at all you need to read this book. One of the myths non-artists have of artists is that it all comes easily. They see you can do art and say,"I wish I could do that..." but what they don't know, what they don't see is the crippling fear. Society says art is a natural talent, you've either got it or you don't. Most of my life art came easy. Draw this, draw that, play this note, play that note, write this, write that - it all came easy. So when you're told your naturally talented and things always with ease, when you hit a major roadblock in developing your skill set it becomes really easy to come to the conclusion that you lack the talent. And when you tell yourself you lack the talent, fear develops. You're having trouble drawing hands the way your idol does. So you're obviously at your limit you tell yourself. And eventually you stop period, because the fear has grown bigger than your love for your work. When you don't draw or write or paint or take photos, the elephant in the room sits there, staring at you. You know what you need to do, but you can't overcome the fear. What you put on the paper is never as good as what's in your head. You like doing art but you feel you haven't "earned" the right to call yourself an artist for whatever reason. The fear is all encompassing of your very being.

Art and Fear strikes into the heart of this mindset. It accurately describes what this feeling is like, how it arises, why you do art to begin with, why it calls you, and why the fear cripples you, and how to overcome it.

Some choice quotes. Not too much because the book is so amazing it must be read.

The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a “serious” education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies. (Yes, the authors really have known students whose parents demanded they stop wasting their time on art or they could damn well pay their own tuition.) Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art —beautiful or meaningful or emotive art —is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunning-ham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting. But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you’re not up to the task —that you can’t do it, or can’t do it well, or can’t do it again; or that you’re not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his / her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is 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.

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 than worrying about how much talent you have —and probably no worry more common. This is true even among artists of considerable accomplishment.

The fear that you’re only pretending to do art is the (readily predictable) consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. After all, you know better than anyone else the accidental nature of much that appears in your art, not to mention all those elements you know originated with others (and even some you never even intended but which the audience has read into your work). From there it’s only a short hop to feeling like you’re just going through the motions of being an artist. It’s easy to imagine that real artists know what they’re doing, and that they —unlike you —are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art. Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work.

The chasm widens even further when your work isn’t going well, when happy accidents aren’t happening or hunches aren’t paying off. If you buy into the premise that art can be made only by people who are extra-ordinary, such down periods only serve to confirm that you aren’t. Before chucking it all for a day job, however, consider the dynamics at work here.

Both making art and viewing art require an ongoing investment of energy —lots of energy. In moments of weakness, the myth of the extraordinary provides the excuse for an artist to quit trying to make art, and the excuse for a viewer to quit trying to understand it. Meanwhile artists who do continue often become perilously self-conscious about their artmaking. If you doubt this could be a problem, just try working intuitively (or spontaneously) while self-consciously weighing the effect of your every action. 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 to their advantage. Art-that’s-about-art has in turn spawned a whole school of art criticism built around the around the demonstrably true (but limited) premise that artists continually “re-define” art through their work. This approach treats “what art is” as a legitimate, serious and even thorny topic, but expends little energy on the question of “what art making is”.

In making art you need to give yourself room to respond authentically, both to your subject matter and to your materials. Art happens between you and something —a subject, an idea, a technique —and both you and that something need to be free to move. 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. Lawrence Durrell likened the process to driving construction stakes in the ground: you plant a stake, run fifty yards ahead a plant another, and pretty soon you know which way the road will run. E.M. Forster recalled that when he began writing A Passage To India he knew that the Malabar Caves would play a central role in the novel, that something important would surely happen there —it’s just that he wasn’t sure what it would be. Control, apparently, is not the answer. 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.

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.

Fears arise when you look back, and they arise when you look ahead. If you’re prone to disaster fantasies you may even find yourself caught in the middle, staring at your half-finished canvas and fearing both that you lack the ability to finish it, and that no one will understand it if you do. More often, though, fears rise in those entirely appropriate (and frequently recurring) moments when vision races ahead of execution. Consider the story of the young student —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?” That’s why they’re called Masters. When he raised David’s discovery from an expression of self-doubt to a simple observation of reality, uncertainty became an asset. 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.

Powerful. If you're an artist this book will speak to your very soul. Even when I'm doing art for 30-40 hours a week minimum, the fear continues to cripple me. But now I'm not scared as much because I have this book as a defense.

Buy this book, you won't regret it. It's cheap. This book will help you no matter the discipline: visual, sculpture, fine, folk, culinary, photography, whatever. You need to give it a read.

Check out the Amazon reviews. It's truly the real deal.

 

[Cindi Mayweather]

Finished. This may be the first thing I give five stars on Amazon. What a book. I'm going to have to re-read it immediately and highlight my favorite parts, of which there are many. This books speaks to me on so many levels.

This fucking book.

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. Inevitably, your work (like, uh, the preceding syllogism...) will be flawed. Why? Because you’re a human being, and only human beings, warts and all, make art. Without warts it is not clear what you would be, but clearly you wouldn’t be one of us.

Nonetheless, the belief persists among some artists (and lots of ex-artists) that doing art means doing things flawlessly —ignoring the fact that this prerequisite would disqualify most existing works of art. Indeed, it seems vastly more plausible to advance the counter-principle, namely that imperfection is not only a common ingredient in art, but very likely an essential ingredient. 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.

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. Believing that artwork should be perfect, you gradually become convinced that you cannot make such work. (You are correct.) Sooner or later, since you cannot do what you are trying to do, you quit.

And in one of those perverse little ironies of life, only the pattern itself achieves perfection —a perfect death spiral: you misdirect your work; you stall; you quit. To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary (and universal) humanity, as though you would be better off without it. Yet this humanity is the ultimate source of your work; your perfectionism denies you the very thing you need to get your work done. Getting on with your work requires a recognition that perfection itself is (paradoxically) a flawed concept. For Albert Einstein, even the seemingly perfect construct of mathematics yielded to his observation that “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” For Charles Darwin, evolution lay revealed when a perfect survival strategy for one generation became, in a changing world, a liability for its offspring. For you, the seed for your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides —valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgmental guides —to matters you need to reconsider or develop further. It is precisely this interaction between the ideal and the real that locks your art into the real world, and gives meaning to both.

 

[Pau]

Sounds like how I feel about math and writing. That and I gave up on illustration so it should be an interesting read. Thanks for the heads up!

 

[Cindi Mayweather]

Sounds like how I feel about math and writing. That and I gave up on illustration so it should be an interesting read. Thanks for the heads up!

It includes writing in this. It's not just visual arts.

 

[sans_pants]

I've been writing scripts and doing cgi for years and I still don't call myself an artist

 

[Cindi Mayweather]

I've been writing scripts and doing cgi for years and I still don't call myself an artist

I know, dude!

 

[olympia]

It's a pretty great book. The bit about the pottery students continues to resonate with me.

 

[Cindi Mayweather]

It's a pretty great book. The bit about the pottery students continues to resonate with me.

The one about perfection?

 

[Keihart]

Powerful stuff from the excerpts, might give it a read.