3 Important Lessons That Creating Art Will Teach You
Whenever I feel stuck or unmotivated and can’t seem to write anything decent, I turn to a book called Art & Fear. It’s a relatively short book written by David Bayles & Ted Orland, but I can’t ever get past the first chapter.
Why, you may ask? It’s not that it’s boring. It’s not that it’s dense and hard to read. It’s not that I’m an extremely slow reader.
It’s because I always end up reading a sentence or a paragraph that catches my attention and spurs me into writing. I swear I haven’t been able to pass page 7 to go to the next chapter because I keep getting new ideas to write about from the same set of words I’ve read countless times.
If you want to become an artist or dive into creative works but you’re scared to make the jump, this book is for you. The book believes these three questions are the questions that matter most in an artist’s development:
What is your art really about?
Where is it going?
What stands in the way of getting it there?
In fact, you don’t even have to open the book. The little summary in the back was enough to excite and motivate me into taking action. Take a look:
Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn’t get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.
This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.
Usually, when a book is reviewed, the reviewer finishes the book and sets aside some comments about the theme and lessons throughout the book.
I will admit that I have only read the back summary and the first chapter, but I don’t really think it’s necessary to finish the book to take away some life-changing lessons. You don’t have to finish a book cover to cover.
(Although, I’d like to see what the rest of the book has to offer someday, if I could get past the first chapter)
Sometimes words will jump out to you on the page. You’re not in control of what interests you or what speaks to you. The only thing you have control over is what you’re willing to do after you have experienced this phenomenon.
Will you read on and consume, or will you stop and create your own artwork?
Creating Art Will Teach You Self-Awareness
Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible.
To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing of it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.
Have you ever thought of a great idea in your head? Have you tried to conceptualize the great idea and bring it into reality? If you’ve tried it, you’ll know how hard it is to recreate exactly what you imagined.
“It sounded better in my head,” is the common phrase that everyone who has gone through the artmaking process utters. They realize the disconnect between the mind and reality. Making something come to life is extremely hard, and more often than not it will never be as perfect as you imagined it in your head.
But if you still stubbornly create art, trying to bridge the gap and create that perfect image or story sitting inside your head, you will get one step closer to creating your masterpiece.
Even if the first product is ugly and flawed, who cares? Like the authors said, viewers only care about the final product. You, as a creator, should care only about the process of bridging the gap to make your masterpiece a reality. Something that is conceptualized by you and only you with courage and willpower that no one else could muster.
Viewers will stay viewers because they are scared of failure. Even when they want to create, they stick with the mindset of the viewer. They only care about the final product, instead of focusing their energy and time on their artmaking process. They care too much about humiliation and judgment from others.
They believe that artmaking is only for geniuses, and fail to realize that many great works come from ordinary people who have cultivated their talents with hard work, dedication and determination.
Creating Art Will Teach You To Be Comfortable Being Alone
For the artist, that truth highlights a familiar and predictable corollary: artmaking can be a rather lonely, thankless affair. Virtually all artists spend some of their time (and some artists spend virtually all of their time) producing work that no one else much cares about. It just seems to come with the territory.
But for some reason — self-defense, perhaps — artists find it tempting to romanticize this lack of response, often by (heroically) picturing themselves peering deeply into the underlying nature of things long before anyone else has eyes to follow.
Romantic, but wrong. The sobering truth is that the disinterest of others hardly ever reflects a gulf in vision. In fact there’s generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist’s work.
Most of my early writing goes unseen. Most of my writing today goes unseen. Only particular pieces blow up, and I have no idea why. The works that I put a lot of effort in gets barely any recognition, and the works I think are going to bomb explode with popularity. Artmaking is a puzzling endeavor.
It’s definitely a lonely walk to be a writer. To be effective, you have to be alone with your thoughts. You can’t have another person around you or else you will get distracted and tempted to procrastinate on your work.
You need to invest time in reading material and planning out what you want to write. To simply have another presence in the room will disrupt you in ways you cannot imagine.
It’s also thankless. People browse around the homepage, look at your content and deem it worthless or boring, even though you spent countless hours and poured your heart out on the piece. That’s why every time someone takes just a minute to write out something thoughtful or express their thanks to me, I get really happy. Even a clap is a small reminder that I have provided something of value to someone out there.
But then again, who are we to expect grand results just for putting in a little effort? Why should we feel like we deserve something from other people?
It should be the other way around. Expect nothing, and take extreme ownership. Everything you want, you have to earn it.
You have to first give them a reason to come back and read your content. You have to provide them with great content every single time. You shouldn’t expect anything to be handed out, and you shouldn’t turn yourself into a victim to protect your ego.
Creating art is extremely fulfilling and fun, but it comes with the price of loneliness and thanklessness. It is an inevitable byproduct of the artmaking process.
Creating Art Will Teach You That Failures Are Essential
The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.
X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about — and lots of it!
The best way to become a writer is to write. The best way to become a painter is to paint. The best way to become a sculptor is to sculpt.
How do you learn the craft? You fail a million times. No matter how much you study the craft and read all there is to know about it, the only thing that can really propel you to greatness is to take action.
We need to become comfortable with failure. We need to learn how to draw a stick figure before drawing Mona Lisa. We need to abandon the ego that we have and learn with humility.
Failures are painful but with enough practice, you can grow thick skin. They will cease to bother you because you understand that failing is only way to get better and smarter. The best thing you can do for yourself is to make as much art as you can. Write a thousand bad essays. If one out of the thousand becomes popular and makes people care about you, it was all worth it.
It certainly is better than the amount of stories you will create waiting around to write the perfect story/novel that will bring you fame and money: 0.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it all up, here is what creating art will teach you:
Creating Art Will Teach You Self-Awareness
Creating Art Will Teach You To Be Comfortable Being Alone
Creating Art Will Teach You That Failures Are Essential
