Comfort in Uncertainty

Ordinary Problems

So far Art and Fear has all been about the fears and uncertainties related to making art. Once the art is made, however, artists run into what the authors call “Ordinary Problems”

I once enrolled in a college level art class which was called “real life,” the summary of class sounded really useful to me. It was about scheduling, dividing up your time between your practice and your business, finding work life balance. That sort of thing.

It sounded like a really valuable class but Ironically, the class was cancelled because not enough people enrolled. Apparently not enough artists were interested in "Real Life."

There’s more to art than just making art, as the authors put it.

If you feel compelled to spend your life making art. If making art is the most important thing to you. There’s the problem of how to make money. Unlike other vocations, there’s no standard path.

The Art World

The authors talk about the difficulties of finding a place in the art world and the real possibility that there may not be a place for you in the art world. This is one topic on which I found this book pretty lacking. A little outdated and narrowly focused.

They’re fixated on what I would call the old art world. Galleries, public exhibitions, grants, publishers, promoters. The pre social media and internet art world.

Not to say that social media has solved these problems, it’s just kind of changed the nature of the problem. Expanded the problem. Created new problems. But that's not the book I'm focused on.

But their main point about the art world is that it's a hard world to navigate. That remains true. And the fear comes from the fact that there may not be a place for you in the art world. 

In their view, that's all the more reason to double down on working on your own work. Because if you just spend all your time looking for a way in to the art world, you aren't making your art, which is your only real hope of getting in at all.

Competition

One of the more useful things they talk about is competition. How it can motivate you to better yourself and take your work to a new level, but the importance of not comparing yourself to others. Because unlike in sports, the standards of comparison vary from artist to artist.

You can see the markers of success that another artist has and use that as a measurement for your own success, but the only measurement that really matters is from piece to piece. Which amounts to a kind of competition with yourself.

As they put it, "the only meaningful comparison between works is not how they rank, but how they work." It’s not a matter of better and worse it’s a matter of working in what way?

Teaching

They have a chapter on teaching. I like some of the advice on this chapter. Namely that the role of the art teacher is to teach by example of yourself as an artist.

My favorite part from that section is a quote by Howard Ikemoto. He said 

“When my daughter was about 7 years old, she asked me what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me incredulous, and said, You mean they forget?”

And I just had to figure out a way to work that in because I love it so much. 

I teach art for money and I enjoy it. Up to a point. I look at it as a loophole to get paid to draw and paint. One of the problems they lay out in the book is that teaching art has the potential of turning you into an art teacher rather than an artist who teaches. I’ve felt this problem. 

I struggle to be vigilant with my time and the types of teaching work I'll take. The more I can just be myself, the better. That's really what the choir is about. I'm trying to match up teaching with my practice.

Concepts

The last two chapters deal more with the ideas of art. The substance of art. These are more conceptual ,theoretical chapters.

As artists we have technique and ideas. Ideas trump technique. The authors view technique as a potential place for artists to give in to fear and hide. If you can just get a perfect technique your art doesn’t have to say anything. It doesn’t have to have a deeper meaning, you don’t have to grapple with big scary ideas. You can just put the puzzle pieces together. They use an analogy:

“Think of it like Olympic diving: you don’t win high points for making even the perfect swan dive off the low board. There’s little reward in an easy perfection quickly reached by many.”

Basically anyone can learn the fundamentals and copy a drawing from a photograph.

Comfort in Uncertainty

They come full circle at the end of the book. They remind us that we aren’t making art to get to a destination or to answer a question, but to look for interesting questions. As corny as it sounds, its the journey not the destination.

"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.”

I read that as meaning this fear and uncertainty that we artists face isn’t some problem to solve, it’s the vary thing we need to embrace. It’s just a part of the process, not some separate thing blocking the way. If you can just notice these fears and embrace them they can become a part of your art life.

Some Criticism

I get what they’re saying in these last few chapters. About the substance of art and the ideas. I just think that there’s better places to get the concepts they’re laying out than in this book. 

They write a little too much like art school graduates or museum curators on some of these particular subjects. Which I…think I’m just allergic to.

If I was making the ultimate guide book for artists, I’d cut out these last two chapters and replace them with some stuff from Rick Rubin’s book the Creative Act and David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. 

I read this book a few years ago. It didn’t really sink into my brain as much the first time. This time I  resonated with most of it. Especially the first half.

The first time I think it was going to be more motivational than it actually is. It's not very motivational. But this time I got some motivation from the lack of motivation. If that makes sense. It’s more like, “this is just how it is.”

However, if you read this book and went “Okay, okay I get it, the uncertainty is inevitable what now? How do I create in the face of that fear?” If you want that motivation, I’d recomend Steven Pressfield’s the war of art.

I read that book once every couple of years. In my ultimate guide book like this for artists I would keep the early chapters of Art and Fear to lay out the problem, then put some chapters of the War of Art in the middle for motivation, then put some stuff from the Creative Act and Catching the Big Fish in there for the finding your own work stuff.

That's Art and Fear.

In March I’ll be doing a deep dive like this on an artist's biography, and then maybe the next month I'll do one on the War of Art. Get a little motivation going in the choir.