Art and Fear (Patreon)

This month I re-read a book about making art called Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

It’s a book on "the perils and rewards of artmaking," as the subtitle of the book puts it. 

The book is Broken down into two parts. Part one is concerned with the fears and uncertainties of making art. Part two is concerned with the fears and uncertainties of navigating the world as an artist.

Art and Fear is a book by artists for artists about making art. 

And not just any artists. As the introduction puts it, "artists making ordinary art." And by that they mean “all art that is not made by Mozart.”

Mozart is meant to evoke the kind of the archetypal creative genius. Creative and genius are both words the authors have major issues with in the book.

As these guys point out “art is rarely made by Mozart-like people. Essentially (statistically speaking) there aren’t any people like that.”

A major problem for us artists is that we hit road blocks. Where it just seems like our work sucks. And that leads to fear and uncertainty. Then we wonder about the Mozart types. The artists who it seems to come easy to. The ones who the work just seems to flow out of.

Maybe making art should just be left up to them.

But if everyone left it up to the Mozart types there wouldn’t be Beethoven types, or Van Gogh types, or William Blake types, or Diane Arbus types. Art would never get done if the art making was just left up to the geniuses. Because, again, there aren't any.  

Struggling isn’t a sign of anything other than our humanness, and humanness alone is what gives us the right to make art.

The Nature of the Problem

They start with the "Nature of the Problem." Raising the questions: 

"How does art get done? Why, often does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?"

They point out that these are modern concerns. And that it was probably easier to make art in caves back in the distant past of our species. 

Not only because they weren’t thinking about “what is art?" Or in terms of “I am an artist,” but that that they didn’t think in terms of ‘I’ at all. People just did what they were naturally inclined to do when faced with a cave wall: create. 

Later there were strong institutions which answered the questions the authors pose. The masterpieces of the renaissance, for example, weren’t products of the individual goals and ambitions of the artists. They were the products of churches and governments making sure the artists finished the art. 

But today art is born out of uncertainty. Basically no one cares about your art. It’s no longer as crucial to our collective experience as it once was. There’s better shinier distractions than there were when we were spending time in caves telling elaborate myths. 

There’s a problem of meaning that many artists feel. Fear and uncertainty are inevitable in this condition. And that’s what these authors are responding to.

For the next few days I'll be posting some of the stuff I found useful from this book. 

I did some poking around online and it seems that artists either love this book or hate it. I can see both sides of it. I have some criticisms of it to be sure (some of it is outdated, some of it is pretentious, some of it is fixated on the fine art world as if that is the only destination for artwork that matters.) 

But there's a lot of baby in the bath water, and that's what I'll be focusing on.

It’s a very short book. 122 pages. The audio book is about 3 hours and is pretty easy to find. I recomend reading it for yourself, and I hope I can get across the stuff that resonated most with me. 

Happy February 25th Everybody

A family friend  was in a horrible bus accident in Tanzania.

He’s in the ICU.

His wife died.

This was his second marriage.

His first wife died from Covid just a few years ago.

I saw him and met his second wife last year at a 4th of July party. They were clearly newly weds and had that honeymooner's glow to them.

He’s the type of person who you can’t picture without a big smile on his face.

Today my brain is all over the place. Even before I got this news it was all over the place.

I took an extra long, extra hot shower.

Goodnight Sweeties