Art & Fear
Things I Highlighted is a bulleted list of particular sentences in a book that stuck out to me. These cannot be viewed as general summaries of books, but rather parts of books that struck me in a way that demanded more of my attention. Typically I share one thing I highlighted from each chapter, so they will appear in the same order they appear in the book. This version of Things I Highlighted will cover Art & Fear, a book that explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that causes so many artists to give up along the way.
Art & Fear
Chapter 1: The Nature of the Problem
One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. 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!
Chapter 2: Art and Fear
Without your active participation their potential remains just that - potential. Materials are like elementary particles: charged, but indifferent. They do not listen in on your fantasies, do not get up and move in response to your idle wishes. The blunt truth is, they do precisely what your hands make them do. The paint lays exactly where you put it; the words you wrote - not the ones you needed to write or thought about writing - are the only ones that appear on the paper.
Chapter 3: Fears About Yourself
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 soon ceases to care whether they are talented.
Chapter 4: Fears About Others
The far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future.
Chapter 5: Finding Your Work
The work we make, even if unnoticed and undesired by the world, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it - or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction to what we do; in our artwork there is nothing but reaction.
The breathtakingly wonderful thing about this reaction is its truthfulness. Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.
Chapter 6: A View Into the Outside World
Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples’ worlds - working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment - and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn’t quite ring true. And so you make your place in the world by making part of it - by contributing some new part to the set.
Chapter 7: The Academic World
The role of the university has always been to provide an education, which is a small but significant step removed from providing training. Training prepares you for a job; an education prepares you for life.
To the critic, art is a noun. To the artist, art is a verb.
Chapter 8: Conceptual Worlds
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.
Chapter 9: The Human Voice
In the end it all comes down to this: 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.