"Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forhead."
- Gene Fowler


I'm reading a book called "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orlando. I want to share some of it with you . . .

"Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself."

There is so much in this book I want to quote to anyone who will listen. Lets see, what else should I give you all right now? Hmm.... Ah! Yes!

"Yet the even the notion that you have a say in this process conflicts with the prevailing view of artmaking today -- namely, that art rests fundamentally upon talent, and that talent is a gift randomly built into some people and not into others." Yeah, I've struggled with this a lot. "In common parlance, either you have it or you don't -- great art is produced of genius, good art a product of near-genius (which Nabokov likened to Near-Beer), and so on down the line to pulp romances and paint-by-the-numbers. This view is inherently fatalistic -- even if it's true, it's fatalistic -- and offers no useful encouragement to those who would make art. Personally, we'll side with Conrad's view of fatalism: namely, that it is a species of fear -- the fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak."

And how about this...

"Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible."

and...

"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!"

And yes, I am going overboard with the quoting. I promise I won't do this all the time. So you can move on to surfing more interesting things, or you can stick with me through this last and longest quote, which challenges much of what I've believed cognitively yet affirms much of what I've known instinctually.

The authors demonstrate that artmaking has been around longer than the art establishment, and then explain,
"What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with "self-expression" reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium. Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are. In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. 'Artist' has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist 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! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful art making -- from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours."