The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections are your guides - valuable, objective, non-judgmental guides to matters you need to reconsider or develop further.
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 an 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.
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.
To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experiences of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it'd dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is wahtever 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.
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. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around.
Art is a high calling - fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others - indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit.
The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly - without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child
Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art
Artmaking involves skills that can be learned. . . 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. . . Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.
Tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.
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
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.
What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work.
To the artist, all problems of art appear uniquely personal. Well, that's understandable enough, given that not many other activities routinely call one's basic self-worth into question.
The difference between art and craft lies not in the tools you hold in your hands, but in the mental set that guides them. For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.
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.
There's generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist's work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.
The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.
Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution - and it should be.
We have to construct communities of artists because they don't naturally exist in our culture.
Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.
Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.
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.
The hardest part of art-making 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.
Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. In society it's a bit more complicated. Nonetheless the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society, nature, and artmaking tend to produce guarded creatures.
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