Art & Fear

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. p. 118

Art & Fear

… the arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. Subjects that draw us in will continue to draw us in… The only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constraints in your life. p. 116

Art & Fear

There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are). p. 115

Art & Fear

Making art depends upon noticing things—things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter… People who have not yet made this small leap do not see the same picture as those who have—in fact, conceptually speaking, they do not even live in the same world. p. 109

Art & Fear

If art is about self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is—but that is not necessarily all it is. It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is help up as the major source of the need to make art… The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are a custodian of issues larger than self. p. 108

Art & Fear

Our understanding of the past is altered by our experiences in the present… your brush only paints a stroke in response to your gesture… all art is autobiographical. p. 107

Art & Fear

There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will not ever be… pretty good evidence that the meaning of the world is made, not found. p. 106

Art & Fear

What science bears witness to experimentally, art has alway known intuitively—that there is an innate rightness to the recurring forms of nature. p. 103

Art & Fear

… making any art piece inevitably engages the large themes and basic techniques that artists have used for centuries. Finding your own work is a process of distillation from each of those traces that ring true to your own spirit… style is not a virtue, it is… the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times… Style is not an aspect of good work, it is an aspect of all work. Style is the natural consequence of habit. p. 103

Art & Fear

… art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique… Yet curiously, the progression of most artist’s work over time is a progression from art toward craft… craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision… the visible edge of art. p. 97, 98, 99

Art & Fear

We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made art from which the “rules” inevitably follow. p. 95

Art & Fear

Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist’s work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third’s a zinger: Was it worth doing? p. 93

Art & Fear

For the artist, the very best writings on art are not analytical or chronological; they are autobiographical. The artist, after all, was there… the best writings about art depicts not the finished piece, but the processes that created it. p. 92

Art & Fear

The really critical decisions facing every artist—like, say, knowing when to stop—cannot be learned from viewing end results. For that matter, a finished piece gives precious few clues to any questions the artist weighed while making the object. p 90

Art & Fear

Idealism has a high casualty rate. The chances are… that if you’re an artist, you’re also a student… most people stop making art when they stop being students. p. 85

Art & Fear

Your life is a paradigm of the process of being an artist, a witness and record to the way time and circumstance, event and emotion, courage and fear surround the making of art. p. 83

Art & Fear

… art has the dubious distinction of being one profession in which you routinely earn more by teaching it than by doing it. p 81

Art & Fear

… most [art] schooling gives every appearance of being not only destructive to the individual, but irrelevant to the great sweep of history as well. Horror stories abound. We’ve all been emotionally singed by some counterpart of the third grad teacher who told certain kids they sang so badly… or some art history teacher who dismissed Rock ‘n Roll… p.80