I recently read Art and Fear. It said many things that I think are generally pretty obvious, but also counterintuitive. I would highly recommend it to anyone, not just artists. These quotes are in order of appearance in the book. If you are short on time, just read the bolded quotes.
The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art
This is a giant hint about art, because it suggests that our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to our getting work done, are a source of strength as well.
if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. to all viewers but yourself, what matters is the final product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.
Your job is to learn to work on your work.
artmaking can be a rather lonely, thankless affair
Consider that if artists 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!
Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.
how frequently and easily success transmutes into depression. Avoiding this fate something to do with not letting your current goal become your only goal.
Operating manual for not quitting A. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently B. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. (Look at it this way: If all goes well, MOMA will eventually come to you)
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.
Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution - and it should be.
The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities.
A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution.
most artists don't daydream about making great art - they daydream about having made great art.
the artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.
the materials of art, like the thumbnail sketch, seduce us with their potential...The blunt truth is, they do precisely what your hands make them do.
Your materials are, in fact, one of the few elements of artmaking you can reasonably hope to control. As for everything else - well, conditions are never perfect, sufficient knowledge rarely at hand, key evidence always missing, and support notoriously fickle.
the piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.
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.
making art is chancy - it doesn't mix well with predictability.
And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.
When you act out of fear, your fears come true.
fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your OWN work.
It's easy to imagine that real artists know what their doing
Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work
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.
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.
Talent may get someone off the starting blocks faster, but without a sense of direction or a goal to strive for, it won't count for much. The world is filled with people who were given great natural gifts, sometimes conspicuously flashy gifts, yet never produce anything. And when that happens, the world ceases to care whether they are talented.
So you may ask, "Then why doesn't it come easily for me?", the answer is probably, "Because making art is hard!"
Well, came to grading time 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.
Some avoid this self-imposed abyss by becoming stupendously productive
The artist who fears annihilation may draw the connection between doing and being a little too tight.
Unfortunately, expectations based on illusion lead almost always to disillusionment
The place to learn about execution is in your execution
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 or 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 parents listens to a child.
In following the path of your heart, the chances are that your work will not be understandable to others.
The risk is fearsome: is 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; your'e 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.
The dilemma seem obvious: risk rejection by exploring new worlds, or court acceptance by following well-explored paths
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.
[when a women's participation in dance was asked to become more serious] Her dancing fell apart. She became stiff and conscious. She got serious.
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.
We don't learn much about making art from being moved by it.
That photograph was mine to experience. but neither it, nor anything like it, was mine to make.
when new tools appear, new artistic possibilities arise.
The dilemma every artist confronts, again and again, is when to stick to familiar tools and materials, and when to reach out and embrace those that offer new possibilities.
a good work of art inevitably call's the viewer's own belief system into question
In making art you court the unknown, and with it the paranoia of those who fear what change might bring.
In a healthy artistic environment, artists are not in competition with each other. Unfortunately, healthy artistic environments are about as common as unicorns.
But occasional competitive grousing is a healthy step removed from equating success with standing atop the bodies of your peers.
a field whose most prominent graduates describe themselves as survivors of their formal education
Accepting this premise leads inescapably to the conclusion that while art should be understood or enjoyed or admired by the reader, it most certainly should not be done by the reader. [sarcasm]
To the critic, art is a noun.
What artists learn from other artists is not so much history or technique (although we learn tons of that too); what we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association.
Three Questions. What was the artist try to achieve? Did he/she succeed? Was it worth doing?
Provocative art challenges not only the viewer, but also its maker.
The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin the work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.
The underlying problem with this is not that the pursuit of technical excellence is wrong, exactly, but simply that making it the primary goal puts the cart before the horse. We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the "rules" inevitably follow.
To the artist, who has an emotional investment in everything, it's more a question of which direction to reach. Compared to other challenges, the ultimate shortcoming of technical problems is not that they're hard, but that they're easy.
Habits are the peripheral vision of the mind.
respond automatically to the familiar, and you're then free to respond selectively to the unfamiliar.
indulge too many habits, and life shrinks into mind-dulling routine. Too few, and coping with a relentless stream of incoming detail overwhelms you.
Yet larger questions will never get engaged unless huge amounts of detail can be trusted to habit.
Recounting his dream, the artist ended fervently with, "I'd give anything to be able to make paintings like that!" "Wait a minute!" his friend exclaimed. "Don't you see? Those were your paintings! They came from your own mind. Who else could have painted them?" Who else indeed.
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.
Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms.
It won't help to know exactly what Van Gogh needed to gain or lose in order to get on with his work. What is worth recognizing is that Van Gogh needed to gain or lose at all, that his work was no more or less inevitable than yours, and that he - like you - had only himself to fall back on.
art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently. On so many different fronts. For so little external reward.
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.