CONTENTS

Step One: You Are a Total Amateur: Things to Think About Before You Even Get Started

1. Don’t Be Embarrassed

2. “Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge.” —Albert Einstein

3. “Tell Your Own Story and You Will Be Interesting.” —Louise Bourgeois

4. Recognize the Otherness of Art

5. Art Is Not About Understanding . . . Or Mastery: It’s About Doing and Experience

6. Embrace Genre

7. Recognize Convention—and Resist Constraint

8. Cast Your Nets into the Waters

9. Develop Forms of Practice

11. Work, Work, Work

Step Two: How to Actually Begin: An Instruction Manual for the Studio

13. Start Working When You Wake Up

14. Make Your Mark

15. Get Some Perspective

16. Imitate . . . Then Separate

17. Use Your Studio

18. Picasso and Matisse at the Border

19. Embed Thought in Material

20. Art Is a Flatworm

21. Listen to the Wildest Voices in Your Head

22. Find Your Own Voice: Then Exaggerate It

23. Clear the Studio

24. There Are No Wasted Days

25. Know What You Hate

26. Finish the Damn Thing!

Step Three: Learn to Think Like an Artist: This Is the Fun Part

27. All Art Is Subjective

28. Look Hard. Look Openly.

29. Artists Are Cats. Art Is a Dog.

30. See as Much as You Can

31. The Cézanne Rule

32. Art Is a Verb

33. Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content

34. Be Inconsistent

35. Make Strength Out of Weakness

36. Own Your Guilty Pleasures

37. Make Art for Now, Not the Future

38. Chance Is the Lucky Bounce of the Imagination

Step Four: Enter the Art World: A Guide to the Snake Pit

39. Have Courage

40. Don’t Define Yourself by a Single Medium

41. No, You Don’t Need Graduate School

42. Be a Vampire; Form a Coven

43. Accept That You’ll Likely Be Poor

44. Define Success

45. Art and Therapy

46. It Takes Only a Few People to Make a Career

47. Learn to Write About Your Work

48. There’s No Such Thing as “Fear of Success”

Step Five: Survive the Art World: Psychic Strategies for Dealing with the Ugliness (Inside and Out)

49. You’ve Got to Want It

50. Make an Enemy of Envy

51. Deadlines from Heaven

52. Learn to Deal with Rejection

53. How to Recover from Critical Injuries

54. Overnight Is Overrated

55. Having a Family Is Fine

Step Six: Attain Galactic Brain: Cosmic Epigrams from Better Heads and Mine

56. “Art Is a Lie That Tells the Truth.” —Pablo Picasso

57. “Artists Do Not Own the Meaning of Their Work.” —Roberta Smith

58. Art Doesn’t Progress

59. What You Don’t Like Is as Important as What You Do Like

60. You Must Prize Radical Vulnerability

61. You Are Always Learning

62. Be Delusional

63. Oh, and Once a Year, Go Dancing

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

About the Author