The Artist's Fears

Fears about art making fall into two families: fears about yourself and fears about your reception by others.

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking is a great go-to book for immediate inspiration. David Bayles and Ted Orland seem to be right on, every time.

What are these fears?  

~~In many cases it's the fear of failing to create something of significance. 

~~We also fear that what we have created is, after all, meaningless. 

~~We fear we won't measure up to our ambition. 

~~We fear boring the reader or viewer. That's the one I fear the most.

~~and more

Bayles and Orland address these fears and more. They talk directly to the writer or artist who doesn't feel legitimate, who fears he or she lacks talent, who is tricked by a desire for perfectionism, who hits a dry spell, and so forth. It's a book well worth reading over and over. It's written in short sections; you can pick it up anywhere and learn about yourself as an artist, or aspiring art maker.   

A writer asked me recently about talent, saying he feared he didn't really have any. I told him talent is over-rated. I think that's true after spending so many years in the classroom observing wasted talent and rewarded effort. An artist who creates one perfect sculpture and only one never does it the first time. A writer's insightful and thoughtful essay comes after years of practice and willingness to fail. We often want immediate results, yet we aren't genuine artists unless we are willing to spend more time than most people can imagine at the desk.

Bayles and Orland reveal the bottom line on the first page: 

...fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work. 

Doing "your own work" as a memoirist means knowing yourself. We find out about ourselves as we write our life experience and, we hope, turn it into artful literature.