excerpt from "Art and Fear"

Excerpt from “Art and Fear, Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, David Bayles and Ted Orland.

Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue--or more precisely, have learned how to NOT quit. But curiously, while artists always have a myriad of reasons to quit, they consistently wait for a handful of specific moments to quit. Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.

Virtually all artists encounter such moments. Fear that your next work will fail is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle. It happens all the time: you focus on some new idea in your work, you try it out, run with it for awhile, reach a point of diminishing returns, and eventually decide its not worth persuing further. Writers even have a phrase for it-"the pen has run dry"- but all media have their equivalents. In the normal artistic cycle, this just tells you that you've come full circle, back to that point where you need to begin cultivating the next new idea. Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens only all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again-and art is all about starting again.

The development of any piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one-and only one-possibility into reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.

That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss-the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. The irony here is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you've imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you're right on the edge of being able to imagine. Designer Charles Eames, arguably the quintessential Renaissance man of the twentieth century, used to complain good-naturedly that he devoted only about one percent of his energy to conceiving a design-and the remaining ninety-nine percent holding onto it as a project ran its course. Small surprise. After all, your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute-but not today, in the piece at hand.

All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.

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 its true, most artist’s 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.