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    Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
    Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
    Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

    By David Bayles and Ted Orland

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    About this ebook

    The book appeals equally to beginning and advanced artists. It is widely used as a required or recommended text in art classes. It has garnered over one hundred reviews and a nearly perfect five-star rating on the Amazon.com website. Over 250,000 copies have been sold. It has also been published in French and Korean language editions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherImage Continuum Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2001
    ISBN9780961454722
    Author

    David Bayles

    David Bayles is a photographer, writer & conservationist. He is the past Director of Pacific Rivers Council and co-author of numerous scientific articles on endangered aquatic species. His recent book Notes on a Shared Landscape offers a superbly crafted collection of his photographs & personal writings about the American West.

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    Reviews for Art & Fear

    4/5

    298 ratings21 reviews

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    • 5/5
      great book. i give to all my artist friends
    • 5/5
      I wish I could quote the whole book here. It just made me giggle again and again. For example, this is me reading Tarot cards;Art is exquisitely responsive. Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art. The work, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it – or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction tow hat 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.And this is the recipe for changing someone else’s mind;When Columbus returned from the New World and proclaimed the earth was round, almost everyone else went right on believing the earth was flat. Then they died – and the next generation grew up believing the world was round. That’s how people change their minds.
    • 5/5
      Much cheaper than therapy. A great book to help with the common pitfalls of art making, most notably quitting. It's well written with a helpful and frank tone (no pretension here).
    • 5/5
      The most useful and thought provoking book I have read on the process of making art! Outstanding!
    • 4/5
      The paradox of artmaking is that most artists believe on some level that they are (or should be) exceptional individuals with a unique vision, but also that that vision should be one that most people should be able to identify with. This book does nothing to resolve that paradox, but it does present us with reasons to live with the contradiction (of our own ordinariness and our art's timelessness; ars longa, vita brevis) and go on producing in spite of it.
    • 5/5
      ' What is your art really about? Where is it going? What stands in the way of getting there? These are questions that matter...' A guide for everybody, even non artists as they may see themselves as artists again... It's not just about visual arts, but ANY form of artistic expression.
    • 5/5
      Years before Malcolm Gladwell built a wonderfully compelling case for the critical importance of practice and opportunity in "Outliers: The Story of Success," David Bayles and Ted Orland spent seven years producing their thin, lean, and absolutely inspiring work on how we can develop our own creative artistry through faith and perseverance. "You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren't yours" (p. 26) they write, and in the process do us all a favor by reminding us that creativity flourishes through what we learn from failure as much as from what we learn through success. We're working with the basics here, as we can see from chapter headings including "Fears About Yourself," "Fears About Others," and "Finding Your Work." The writers address the perils of trying to create work that pleases others rather than work that begins by pleasing ourselves--a theme of interest to anyone involved in creative endeavors, including any trainer-teacher-learner. They remind us that if we teach, we also need to set aside time for pursuing our craft--a warning that applies equally to trainers who may not make the time to continue pursuing the learning opportunities that they need to be effective. They conclude by suggesting that making art "is to sing with the human voice" and that if we are to persevere, we would do well to begin by developing our own unique voices and using those voices to explore our darkest chasms to produce the "revealing light" of our own minds" (p. 117).
    • 1/5
      Began well, but faded. Never finished it
    • 4/5
      A short note before I begin my review: I'm neither an art student, nor teacher. But art is still a hobby of mine.
      This is the kind of book you should read when you suddenly become unsure of your art. Some things in this book you probably already know and some you might assume. To see them written down in an actual book can be quite reassuring, though.
      As for me, this book explained quite a lot of things to me that somehow I already knew at some point. Kind of gave me a confidence boost.
    • 5/5
      Art & Fear is one of those books that I keep returning to over and over again. I buy copies to give away like I’m proselytizing for a creative revival.
    • 5/5
      A great book about the process of making art and the many challenges that prevent or stop artists from creating as well as instructions on how to push through resistance and get the work done. Very valuable reading for a jaded veteran creator who often wonders, "Should I quit?" After reading this book, the answer is a resounding, "No!"
    • 1/5
      WHY ON EARTH THERE ARE HUMAN BEING WILL WASTE THEIR TIME ON READING SUCH TRASHY BOOK?
    • 5/5
      This book puts into words the battles of artists with themselves to continue to create despite self doubt and lack of approval from the world, exploring the question of why artists quit.
    • 5/5
      'Art and Fear' is the most concise and friendly companion to anyone trying to define themselves as an artist that I have so far encountered.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book isn't a "how to" manual. It's a book about the fears behind art and artmaking. It discusses the fears and other ways of looking at them - in other words, it helps you to confront your fears.

      This book is a MUST for the shelf of anyone creative - be you a fine artist, an illustrator, an animator, a graphic designer, a cartoonist, etc. Even now, I still pull it out from time to time to allay the doubts I have.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I got this book from the library and then I had to buy it for my own collection. It resonated with me as an artist. I needed to be able to write in it and respond. There are some really great passages in there that help me to get past my doubts and artist blocks. It should be in every artists library and it should be manditory reading for every studio art major.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      One to keep and re-read again and again. I love little books that make great and lasting points. This is one of them.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A beautiful, short ode to the career of an artist, the philosophy behind it, and its many perils.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Sadly, I found this book horribly boring and uninteresting so much so that my mind often wandered as I was reading. However, I thoroughly appreciate what the authors were saying and trying to achieve.
    • 5/5
      A must read for every artist and art appreciator/viewer, because "we all get hung up" soon or later on the philosophical and psychological what is art? What was (is) the artist trying to say? How do artists persevere in a world that is obsessed with art fashion?Two of my favourite quotes will serve as displays of the intriguing writing style that so captivated me: With respect to Academia: wherein most prominent graduate students describe themselves as survivors of their formal education: "The thought of working in the art education system ~ either as student or faculty ~ is about as attractive as standing beneath a steady drizzle of dead cats." (p. 80). (Note: any grad student surviving long enough to achieve their degree would probably agree with this).In reference to artists' worries about funding and achieving solo exhibitions (when straying too far from the innocuous norm), "the American Revolution was not financed by grants from the Crown" (p.68). Perhaps that observation was meant you weren't supposed to be intimidated by societal acceptance, and the authors do go on to suggest strategies for survival.Aside from some amusing writing, I found the philosophy encouraging and reassuring. Whether you write music, dance, paint or sculpt, there was a feeling of camaraderie and understanding here that I've never encountered elsewhere.
    • 4/5
      With pearls of wisdom gleaned from the writings of such as Conrad and Hippocrates, the authors offer artists (and would-be artists) advice and encouragement to follow a calling that is too frequently thought to be more appropriately a hobby. Though the reader addressed is one who aspires to art as a profession, much of what Bayles and Orland offer is as applicable to any undertaking: "Artmaking [dentistry, plumbing, financial analysis, tree surgery] involves skills that can be learned. . . . Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work" (p. 3). Liberal doses of unpleasant reality are well balanced with insight and reassurance. Art and Fear is the sort of little book that one might keep about for an occasional dose of comfort and motivation.

    Book preview

    Art & Fear - David Bayles

    INTRODUCTION

    THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT MAKING ART. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people — essentially (statistically speaking) there aren’t any people like that. But while geniuses may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties artmakers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.

    This, then, is a book for the rest of us. Both authors are working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. The observations we make here are drawn from personal experience, and relate more closely to the needs of artists than to the interests of viewers. This book is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.

    David Bayles

    Ted Orland

    PART I

    Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

    — Gene Fowler

    I.

    THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

    Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult.

    — Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)

    MAKING ART IS DIFFICULT. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: 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?

    These questions, which seem so timeless, may actually be particular to our age. It may have been easier to paint bison on the cave walls long ago than to write this (or any other) sentence today. Other people, in other times and places, had some robust institutions to shore them up: witness the Church, the clan, ritual, tradition. It’s easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God than when working in the service of self.

    Not so today. Today almost no one feels shored up. Today artwork does not emerge from a secure common ground: the bison on the wall is someone else’s magic. 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. This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.

    Yet 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. In common parlance, either you have it or you don’t — great art is a product 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.

    But while talent — not to mention fate, luck and tragedy — all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis. Here in the day-to-day world (which is, after all, the only one we live in), the job of getting on with your work turns upon making some basic assumptions about human nature, assumptions that place the power (and hence the responsibility) for your actions in your own hands. Some of these can be stated directly:

    A FEW ASSUMPTIONS

    ARTMAKING INVOLVES SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED. The conventional wisdom here is that while craft can be taught, art remains a magical gift bestowed only by the gods. Not so. In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive. Clearly, these qualities can be nurtured by others. Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work. It’s true that every few years the authors encounter some beginning photography student whose first-semester prints appear as finely crafted as any Ansel Adams might have made. And it’s true that a natural gift like that (especially coming at the fragile early learning stage) returns priceless encouragement to its maker. But all that has nothing to do with artistic content. Rather, it simply points up the fact that most of us (including Adams himself!) had to work years to perfect our art.

    ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It’s difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn’t need to make art. And so, ironically, the ideal artist is scarcely a theoretical figure at all. If art is made by ordinary people, then you’d have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess. This is a giant hint about art, because it suggests that our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to our getting work done, are a source of strength as well. Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.

    MAKING ART AND VIEWING ART ARE DIFFERENT AT THEIR CORE. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he / she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. That belief, if widely embraced, would make this book unnecessary, false, or both. Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. 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. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

    For the artist, that truth highlights a familiar and predictable corollary: artmaking can be a rather lonely, thankless affair. Virtually all artists spend some of their time (and some artists spend virtually all of their time) producing work that no one else much cares about. It just seems to come with the territory. But for some reason — self-defense, perhaps — artists find it tempting to romanticize this lack of response, often by (heroically) picturing themselves peering deeply into the underlying nature of things long before anyone else has eyes to follow.

    Romantic, but wrong. The sobering truth is that the disinterest of others hardly

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