Art & Fear: Part I

Following up on the perfection idea. (From Art & Fear page 29)

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was diving the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weight the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded for "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot-albeit a perfect one-to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes-the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

I really like this story. I think it's because a lot of the time we have an idea we want to get across and we just go for it. We put all other ideas aside, even though we can learn from the mistakes of those ideas, and just strive to achieve the goal of making our idea perfect. I'd really recommend reading this book. I just read it yesterday and it's changed a lot of my ideas about being an artist. But since some of you might not read it or might want to read about some other points I'll just write down some quotes that I found helpful and the page numbers if you want to get more context.

"Control, apparently, is not the answer." page 21

"Tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite for succeeding." page 21

"The world is filled with people who were given great natural gifts, sometimes conspicuously flashy gifts, yet never produce anything. And when that happens, the world soon ceases to care whether they are talented." page 27

"Talent is a snare and a delusion." page 28

"Getting on with your work requires a recognition that perfection itself is (paradoxically) a flawed concept." page 31

"Whatever they have is something needed to do their work-it wouldn't help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don't lack it. You don't need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period." page 34

"The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly-without judgement, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need." page 36

"We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance, and approval of others." page 38

"We'd all love to squirm out of this one, but the undeniable fact is that your art is not some residue left when you subtract all the things you haven't done-it is the full payoff for all the things you have done." page 56

There are a lot of other good quotes I have highlighted, but I can't write them all down. So I would encourage you to read the book for yourselves. It really is a great book and it has a lot of good insights.