Art & Fear
By David Bayles and Ted Orland
(Image Continuum Press, $12.95, paperback)
The book Art & Fear is a compact work with just 122 pages. Yet it lives up to its tagline, “An Artist’s Survival Guide,” and its subtitle: “Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.”
The book’s co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, describe their book as being “about making art. Ordinary art.” Their work is not aimed at the rare creative geniuses, the Mozarts of the world, who make big splashes. Instead, it is written for “the rest of us” who strive to create works of art in many different forms on a daily basis.
The co-authors note: “We’re all subject to a familiar and universal progression of human troubles — troubles we routinely survive, but which are (oddly enough) routinely fatal to the artmaking process.”
The challenge for artists is to learn how to continue working and creating in the face of these unavoidable troubles. In other words, we must learn “how to not quit,” the writers point out.
“Fear that your next work will fail,” they emphasize, “is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle.”
It may not be easy to remember that or to use it to your advantage while struggling to start and finish some type of artistic creation.
Art & Fear seeks to help artists understand the sources of their fears. And it offers ways to try to overcome those fears and keep working even when you have no clear idea what you are trying to create.
“Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work — for the place their work belongs.”
The $12.95 paperback is now published by Image Continuum Press, and it already has been reprinted at least 19 times since it first appeared in 1994.
Clearly, a lot of fearful, stressed-out artists have been reading it and recommending it to others.
– Si Dunn
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