An excerpt:
Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker. Simply put, you have to be there. The surprising (and probably disturbing corollary) to this is that we don’t learn much about making art from being moved by it. Making art is bound by where we are, and the experience of art we have as viewers is NOT a reliable guide to where we are. As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand – yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion – to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place. (p.52)
This is one of many passages where authors David Bayles and Ted Orlund communicate their philosophy of “artmaking” in their fine book Art and Fear. What we find over and over again in their position is that the key to remaining an artist has nothing to do with following the muses or chasing inspiration but in establishing steady work habits. The best way to refine your skills is to just work a lot. The best way to make a lot of good art is to just make a lot art. Sure, some of it will suck, but then some of it won’t.
Though the book deals mostly in the language of painting, the authors do make room in their discussion for sculptors, musicians, and occasionally dancers. Nearly everything they said can be applied directly to writing and even scholarly study (where my interest lies), though not all of it.
The book is short and takes a shot-gun approach to different topics. It makes it hard to blog about, so I’ll just be posting some of my favorite passages below and offering some brief comments.
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On how you can’t just borrow meaning and power from other times and places. This makes me think of neo-pagans dressing up as druids in the forest and chanting about the holly – and checking their twitter feed on their iPhone during the slow moments. Uh, no.
Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists – people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet – casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a different between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman. (p.55)
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On average, the younger artists tends to experiment with a large and varied range of tools and materials, while the veteran artist tends to employ a small and specific set. (p.59)
You see this with a lot of old guys. Most even. Girard, Freud, Plato, you name it. If you have a nice hammer, everything looks like a nail. Younger guys are still trying to figure out what works.
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I really liked this passage with some conjecture about Chopin. The idea that an artist has certain things he does to keep him warmed up or push through creative lulls are laziness – this seems to be a VERY important observation and something worth applying immediately.
The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned from trivial reasons. It’s easy to imagine today’s art instructor cautioning Chopin that the Mazurka thing is getting a little repetitive, that the work is not progressing. Well, true, it may not have been progressing – but that’s not the issue. Writing Mazurkas may have been useful only to Chopin – as a vehicle for getting back into the work, and as a place to begin making the next piece. For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and ANY device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value. (p.61)
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I loved this quote – especially since I have a seven-year-old daughter who loves to draw.
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day 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?” (p.79)
-Howard Ikemoto [A Japanese-American painter]
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Here, a professor recounts how he was able to carve out time to keep working on his art, even with lots of time-consuming academic duties.
“From the day I was hired I began cultivating a reputation with the Art Department of being sort of a flake. I found that after a year or so of losing track of my committee assignments, forgetting to answer memos and missing departmental meetings – well, after a while they just stopped asking me to do all those things.” (p.85)
I have really mixed feelings about this sort of “planned flakiness”. Clever? Yes. Christian? Not exactly. Some of my favorite and LEAST favorite professors in university did something like this. The best ones blew off the waste and reinvested in their students personally. The crappy ones blew it off and reinvested in their own self-contained hobbies.
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Some excellent commentary here on graduate school, especially in the arts:
That prospect is daunting enough that many artists drop out before ever completing their studies; others do graduate, but then – pressed by economics – find no way to continue artmaking afterwards. And yet others prolong the death-watch by entering graduate programs. The latter approach, placed atop fifteen-odd years of already-completed education, is superfluous at best and often actually harmful to the student’s artmaking capacity. (Jerry Uelsmann refers to coaxing art from graduate students as a process of “rehabilitating the over-educated”!)
This whole scenario is a tragedy seldom addressed by academics, and even then is rarely acknowledged as a failure of the system. Watching from a safely tenured vantage point, the system instead laments the failure of the student. Poor therapists, I’m told, always blame their clients. (p.88)
If the modern university is going to survive, it needs to stop making false promises. It will not survive – at least not on near as large a scale.
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This section about over-focusing on technique rights true to me. This excerpt came after a section where he talked about how photography, for a couple decades anyway, had been taken over by folks whose chief concern was achieving a certain sort of color tone and contrast, to the ignorance of many other aspects.
An equivalent fate befell much of twentieth century symphonic music, which was seduced by arcane harmonic theory to the degree that its critical audience drifted progressively to other idioms (like jazz) that remained ground in the rhythms of the real world. (p.96)
Yes, a drive-by criticism of 12-tone atonality. But it deserves it.
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What do you practice? What do you work toward? As a musician, I often feel limited by my technique. However, there is an easier solution to this than the composer who feels limited by lack of ideas.
While mastering a technique is difficult and time-consuming, it’s still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal – a “right answer” – than to give form to a new idea. (p.96)
This principal can be seen daily in Ph.D. dissertations and other scholarship. It’s a lot easier to recycle someone else’s work and synthesize it into a 400-page paper then to come up with your own clever idea.
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Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique. (p.97)
This is true and also explains the appeal of much pop music that may not necessarily have proper technique. I once heard a man tell me how much he hated Sheryl Crow’s music because “she can’t sing worth crap”. Well, though I’m not a big fan, I still like some of her stuff. It’s interesting because of the ideas (the songwriting, the emotion, the Americana), not her raw singing technique. If you just want that, listen to Dawn Upshaw.
For scholars, some of their best works is often their sloppiest since it is about ideas and not footnote density.
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G.K Chesterton is quoted (on page 101). He’s referred to as a mathematician though. Ha! Oops.
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Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work. (p.54)
“Occupy aesthetic space” eh? Gosh, for just a sec I thought I was back to reading Kierkegaard.
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A great description here of growth. This is exciting.
It’s demonstrably true that all of us do (from time to time) experience conceptual jumps, and while ours may not affect the orbit of planets [like Newton], they markedly affect the way we engage the world around us. Study French, for instance, and you’ll likely spend the first month painstakingly translating it word by word into English to make it understandable. Then one day – voila! – you find yourself reading French without translating it, and a process that was previously enigmatic has become automatic. Or go mushroom hunting with someone who really knows mushrooms, and you’ll first endure some downright humiliating outings in which the expert finds all the mushrooms and you find none. But then at some point the world shifts, the woods magically fill – mushrooms everywhere! – and a view that was previously opaque has become transparent. (p.110)
Religious conversion is like this too.
And continuing…
For the artist, such lighting shifts are a central mechanism of change. They generate the purest form of metaphor: connections are made between unlike things, meanings from one enrich the meanings of the other, and the unlike things become inseparable. Before the leap there was light and shadow. Afterwards, objects float in a space where light and shadow are indistinguishable from the object they define.
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This sounds a bit like “you can win with the hand you’re dealt.” It would be probably more accurate to say “you can only play with the hand you’re dealt.”
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. (p.116)
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Overall, I really liked this book. It was a lot better than “War and Art”. It’s one of those that is worth rereading again in a few years.