Scum Choir

Uncertainty and the Art Making Process- Art and Fear pt. II

Added 2024-02-27 00:57:36 +0000 UTC

To make art today you have to be making work that nourishes you. Because the odds are that your work will not be valued by anyone else.

Because of this fact, making art (in the modern western world at least) comes with a certain amount of fear and insecurity baked into the endeavor.

Some things to keep in mind during thought spirals

To take a concrete example of one of the most common ways this fear manifests itself, the authors focus in on talent.

The thought spiral goes something like :

Talent is outside of your control. Talent is randomly inherited by a few people who make genius work. And you aren’t one of them. So the best you can hope for is making art that comes close… but never quite gets there.

The Authors reject this sentiment as fatalistic. They offer a few assumptions to keep in mind as these types of intrusive thoughts (not just about talent, but any intrusive thoughts that make you feel you shouldn't make art) start hitting you:

1. Art making involves skills that can be learned. As long as you are focusing on developing those skills. you’re doing the right thing.

2. Art is made by ordinary people. It has to be. Because art reflects our humanity. Which includes our flaws. Shakespearean tragedies wouldn’t be as interesting hundreds of years later if they were made by flawless individuals about flawless individuals showcasing their flawlessness.

Art would all be puff pieces and propaganda in that world. It takes flawed people to make art that speaks to our messy humanness.

3. Making and Viewing art are fundamentally different things. As they put it,

“To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns. Their job is whatever 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.”

4. Art making has been around longer than the art establishment. There was art before there was a class of people called artists or buildings called galleries or museums. The impulse to create is deeper and older than that.

So forget about you-the-artist and just give in to the instinct to create. Make stuff.

Quitting and Stopping

From here they reflect on artists who quit making stuff. Most people who begin, quit. The people who quit are virtually the same as the artists who continue. Practicing artists are just the ones who learned how not to quit.

Quitting and stopping are different things.

You only know that you’ve quit in retrospect, as they point out in the book

“...Thirty years later you confide to someone over coffee that, well, yes, you had wanted to paint when you were much younger. Stopping happens all the time. Quitting happens once.”

The reasons why you quit and the reasons why you stop are the same reasons. One is just a permanent version of the other.

The reasons all have to do with uncertainty. You feel your ideas are played out, you lose your place to display your work, you reach a major goal and don’t know what to do after that.

Whatever the reasons are, their strategy to avoid quitting is simple and effective for this-and many other issues related to art and fear:

Find a group of other artists and share your work with them. Make that group the primary destination for your work, rather than a gallery, a museum or social media. Get feedback. Share your uncertainty.

“Art is a high calling - fears are coincidental…what separates artists from ex- artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don’t, quit. Each step in the art making process puts that issue to the test.”

Fears and the Art Making Process

Vision and Execution

The authors then reflect on the steps in the art making process and the fears that correspond with them.

Starting with vision and execution.

"Fears arise when you look back and they arise when you look ahead." Vision moves at a faster speed than our ability to work.

The authors tell a story about how one of them was taking piano lessons and lamented to his teacher, “I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get it out of my fingers.”

The Piano teacher replied, “What makes you think that ever changes?”

In the beginning of any work, imagination is in control. The horizon of possibilities is infinite.

As soon as you start laying down brush strokes, or writing sentences, or playing notes, you begin eliminating possibilities and Imagination becomes less and less useful to completing the work.

Imagination can begin working on a hundred pieces at a time. But moment to moment you can only work on the one piece that is right in font of you.

“A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution. And perhaps surprisingly, the more common obstacle to achieving that correspondence is not undisciplined execution, but undisciplined imagination…the artist’s life is not frustrating because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.”

Materials

Materials are where our imaginations confront reality.

Materials are the elemental particles of our work. They contain nothing but potential energy. They are charged but indifferent.

"[materials]do not listen in on your fantasies, do not get up and move in response to your idle wishes. The blunt truth is, they do precisely what your hands make them do. The paint lays exactly where you put it; the words you wrote-not the ones you needed to write or thought about writing- are the only ones that appear on the paper….what counts in making art, is the actual fit between the contents of your head and the qualities of your materials.”

But the good news about this blunt truth about materials, is that it is one of the rare things in art that we can hope to have any control over.

However, everything else out there is uncertain.

Uncertainty

Every artist I know is working on their paintings for their gallery shows up until it’s time to pack them in the car and take them to be hung.

Every musician I know is tweaking the final mix and song order up until the last minute when the album drops.

Tolstoy was making changes to War and Piece as it finally rolled onto the press, as the authors note.

We don’t know if we’re losing sight of the original idea, or if we are making the right changes. We simply do something then respond to what we did.

Am I done? why is this bothering me? should I change it? It's rarely clear.

“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.”

The next two chapters are about Fears about yourself and Fears about how others receive your work. Internal fears and external fears. I'll pick up there in the next post.

images: the House of Death by William Blake, Melancholy by Edvard Munch, The Painter and the Art lover by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Young Draftsman copying an academy study by Jean-Baptiste-Simeone Chardin, Unfinished Study by Matthias Grunewald, Friends by Konstantin Makovsky, An early picture of an older painting of mine, My watercolor pallet, A manuscript of Beethoven's 9th symphony notice the scribbled out marks, Snow Storm-Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth by J.M.W Turner