Art & Fear

QUESTIONS

Over the long run, the people with the interesting answers are those who ask the interesting questions. Sometimes (and probably far more often than we realize), the really important questions roll around in our minds for a long time before we act upon them. Sometimes, in fact, they sit there for a long time before we even realize they’re important. The question that probably served as the seed crystal for this book was posed to the authors nearly twenty years earlier. The occasion was a friendly debate surrounding the formation of a small artists’ collective. The question was: Do artists have anything in common with each other?

Like any good question, that one quickly generated a flurry of relatives: How do artists become artists? How do artists learn to work on their work? How can I make work that will satisfy me? For young artists filled with energy and idealism, the answers seemed just around the corner. Only as the years passed did we begin to encounter, with increasing frequency, a much darker issue: Why do so many who start, quit?

Taken together, this cluster of questions marks the central pivot of Art & Fear. It’s an odd cluster — not arcane enough, perhaps, to interest scholars, but too elusive to attract pop psychologists. Perhaps that’s just as well. We live in a world where the ready-made observations about artmaking are typically useless, frequently fatalistic.

Q: Will anyone ever match the genius of Mozart?

A: No.

Thank you — now can we get on with our work?

Equally, 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.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells into art?

Artists come together in the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice their art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but the similarities. Today those similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity — audience, critics, economics, trivia — in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it’s not art. Your job is to draw a line from your life to your art that is straight and clear.

CONSTANTS

To a remarkable degree the outside world consists of variables and the interior world consists of constants. The constants are, well, constant: barring mental breakdown or a rare tropical fever, you’ll carry the same burdens tomorrow and next year as you do today. We experience life as artists no differently from the way we experience life in any other role — we simply exist, perhaps watching from an imaginary point a little behind our eyes, while the scene we observe from that steady vantage point changes constantly.

This sense of interior stability is consistent with one widely observable truth: the arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. Subjects that draw us in will continue to draw us in. Patterns we respond to we will continue to respond to. We are compelled by forces that, like the ocean current, are so subtle and pervasive we take them utterly for granted. Those odd moments when we notice the sea we swim in leave us as surprised as the discovery by Moliere’s character that he was speaking prose, that indeed he had always spoken prose.

The artistic evidence for the constancy of interior issues is everywhere. It shows in the way most artists return to the same two or three stories again and again. It shows in the palette of Van Gogh, the characters of Hemingway, the orchestration of your favorite composer. We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in — and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? 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 constants in your life.

VOX HUMANA

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art & fear. Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them. What veteran artists share in common is that they have learned how to get on with their work. Simply put, artists learn how to proceed, or they don’t. The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone — it’s non-transferable and of little use to others. It won’t help you to know exactly what Van Gogh needed to gain or lose in order to get on with his work. What is worth recognizing is that Van Gogh needed to gain or lose at all, that his work was no more or less inevitable than yours, and that he — like you — had only himself to fall back on.

Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently. On so many different fronts. For so little external reward. Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues. You have to find your work all over again all the time, and to do that you have to give yourself maneuvering room on many fronts — mental, physical, temporal. Experience consists of being able to reoccupy useful space easily, instantly.

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.