Art & Fear

This book is called an artist's survival guide, but it is more like a reality check. How many of you stop short of finishing work because it's not "good enough"? I do. All the time. I cannot seem to quiet that voice inside my head that tells me I'm a fraudulent wanna-be for attempting (or gasp, actually creating) a piece of work that is supposed to replicate my inner world.

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. It's altogether too seductive to approach your proposed work believing your materials to be more alleable than they really are, your ideas more compelling, your execution more refined. As Stanley Kunitz once commented, "The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language." - Art and Fear, D. Bayles & T. Orland.

Art cannot be achieve the impossible; it cannot replace the depths of our minds. It can only represent, in its own forms, what - in its perfection - is the human imagination. Here's to the tension between the mind and the matter, and the courage to live in it.