So as part of my partly self-imposed stint of unemployment, I’ve had a bit more time to read, which is a great thing for me. I’ve always found reading to be relaxing and informative by nature. In particular I’ve been reading Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s a book that wears its contents on its sleeve. It primarily concerns itself with the difficulties that artists face when trying to create their (our) work. It covers a range of these from the eternal feeling of being an imposter, the lie that we tell ourselves that “if I just do this then I’ll be an artist”, dealing with the desired to be accepted, perfectionism and a whole host of other, well, Perils™.
So far I’ve been finding the book to be very cutting as I’ve struggled throughout my life to view myself as an artist. It’s not something that I ever expected myself to be or identify with, but increasingly as I’ve been getting closer and closer to unifying who I am and who I want to be, I’ve found myself more closely associating my Self with the idea I have in my head of what an artist is. Creating things is second nature to me, as I believe it is to most people, in fairness, but I find I don’t feel like myself unless I’m creating something, particularly when I’m not making things with my hands. That, and the impetus of the book to think of myself as an artist have me wanting to commit a bit more to the idea that maybe I am an artist and try to orient myself towards that, which means being even more vulnerable than usual (yikes).
The book features a number of quotes I’ve found very powerful an that I want to take with me as I continue along my journey of figuring out who I am and why I’m here, so here are a few of them with my own commentary added.
On artmaking being older than the idea of “being” an artist (Part I - I. The Nature of The Problem)
ARTMAKING HAS BEEN AROUND LONGER THAN THE ART ESTABLISHMENT. Through most of history, the people who made art never thought of themselves as making art. In fact it’s quite presumable that art was being made long before the rise of consciousness, long before the pronoun “I” was ever employed. The painters of caves, quite apart from not thinking of themselves as artists, probably never thought of themselves at all.
This quote gets to the core of what I think is a core truth about humanity that I repeat time and again, partly because I genuinely believe it and largely because I’m trying to believe it about myself:
We are all artists.
Art is fundamentally a human characteristic. Whether or not we are all committed to our art or we find it to be key to our own identities is immaterial in my opinion, but we, at the very least, all have the capacity to be artists. The only credential you need to prove that you are an artist, then, is a body of work. This can be easier or harder to produce depending on who you are and the structure of your life (as the book goes on to discuss), but one of the core ideas of the text is that if you make art, you are an artist.
On the vulnerability of making art and the self-doubt that arises (Part I - II. Art and Fear )
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
Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about.
This section in particular resonated very strongly with me. For years I’ve held the view that I have nothing worth saying, so it’s better for everyone if I just say nothing. A childhood of being made to feel small will do that to you. Thankfully, years of therapy, internal work and the company of wonderful people have allowed me to begin rewriting that script, but I do still find the shackles of that belief preventing myself from approaching the work I want to do in earnest, often stopping short of completing tools or pieces I do genuinely care about, relegating them to things only I ever see and use, never allowing anyone to even try to make use of them or connect with them.
This makes me want to take a second (third, fourth, umpteenth) look at some of the projects I’ve abandoned to a sad existence in my head, my notebooks, or on my harddrive and let them see the light of day.
On imposter syndrome (Part I - III: Fears About Yourself - Pretending)
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 last part of this quote, Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work. Is something that I have been letting myself fall victim to for as long as I can remember.
On perfectionism (Part I - III: Fears About Yourself - Perfection)
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.
Let’s just say that I stay headed for big trouble 💀.
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 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.
Now this one is one I know I need to carry with me and into the future forever. The reason so many of my projects stay locked away on my harddrive is because they “weren’t ready” and the next one would be, but that was never true. Without treating these projects as if they were the real deal and instead just practice for something else, I never let myself actually explore what their flaws actually were and how I’d improve upon them in the next project. By letting them sit there, I intended for them to be the guides for the next project, but what they actually did was just serve as false evidence of my inability to create something real and valuable.
On structuring one’s life around their art (Part I - V: Finding Your Work - Canon)
The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over — and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns. Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so. Once you have found the work you are meant to do, the particulars of any single piece don’t matter all that much.
And yes, the hard part. This is something I do somewhat instinctively as it relates to software and the tools I use to write my blogs and that sort of thing, but I don’t really have much to say here just yet as it relates to building my life around the things I want to make. That being said, I am going to try to keep this in mind as I continue to reshape my life around the things that matter to me.