ART and FEAR

ART and FEAR

The fear that you are only pretending to be an artist is (predictably) a consequence of doubting your own artistic credentials. After all, you know more than anyone else about the accidental nature of much of what you do in your art, not to mention all the elements that you know have originated in others (and still others that were not your intention, but the audience saw in their work). From that point it is a simple jump for you to feel that you are still nothing but an artist's apprentice. It is easy to imagine that true artists know what they are doing, and that they - unlike you - are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art. Fear that you're not a real artist does with what you underestimate yourself and your work.

The abyss increases even more when your work is not going well, when happy accidents are not happening or intuitions are not getting you anywhere. If you believe the premise that art can only be done by extraordinary people, these periods simply serve to confirm that you are not one of them.

Before throwing everything up for some work, however, consider the dynamics in play here. Whether making art or seeing art requires a massive investment of energy. In moments of weakness, the myth of the extraordinary provides an excuse for an artist to give up trying to make art and also gives an excuse to anyone who sees to stop understanding art.

Meanwhile, artists who continue to often become dangerously self-conscious about their art. If you doubt that this can be a problem, simply try to work intuitively (or spontaneously) while self-consciously weighing the effect of each action of yours. The growing prevalence of reflective art - art that looks inside, having itself as subject - illustrates at some stage that artists may simply be turning that obstacle into an advantage. Arte-que-é-sobre-a-arte has in turn created a whole new school of art critics built on the true but limited idea that arithts continually "redefine" art through their work. This approach treats "what is art" as a legitimate, serious and even thorny topic, but spends little energy on the question "what is the artist doing art."

Clearly there is something unbalanced here. After all, if there was a continuous redefinition of "what is chess", you would probably feel a little apprehensive about starting to play chess. Of course you can always continue to play by limiting yourself to a few easy moves you've already seen work for others. And then conclude that since you can not be sure what chess is, you could not be a real chess player and you were only pretending to play while moving pieces. You may even secretly wish to lose by thinking you deserve to lose. If this scenario sounds unreal to chess, unfortunately, it is disheartening and very common in art.

But while you may feel that you are only pretending to be an artist, there is no way to pretend that you are making art. Go ahead, try writing a story while pretending to be writing a story. It's not possible. Your work may not be what curators want to exhibit or publishers want to publish, or showcase gallerists but these are completely different matter. You do good jobs by doing many bad jobs and gradually weeding out bad ones, the parts that are not yours. It's called feedback and is the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your job, doing your art. After all, someone has to do their job and you are the person who is closest to you to accomplish as you wish or aspirate.

EVERY TALENT

Talent, in popular dialect, is "what comes easy". So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach the point where work does not come easy and - It's just like you were afraid!

Wrong. By definition, anything you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no waste of energy to worry about just how talented you are - and there is probably no more common concern. This is true even among artists of considerable achievement

If talent was pre-requisite, then the better the art, the easier it would have been. But sadly, fate is rarely so generous. For each artist who developed mature vision with grace and speed, countless others laboriously nurtured their art through fertile periods and dry periods, through false beginnings and explosions, through successive and significant changes of direction, media, and subject. Talent can make someone get out of the basics faster, but without a sense of direction or a goal to aim, does not count much. The world is full of people who have been given absurd natural talents and yet never produce anything. And when that happens, the world no longer cares about those who are talented.

Even in the case where talent remains constant, those who rely on talent only and do not develop it onward, quickly reach peak, and soon disappear into obscurity. Examples of geniuses simply accentuate the truth. Newspapers love to print stories of five-year-old boys who are musical prodigies, but you rarely read that one of them is on their way to becoming the next Mozart. The point here is that whatever the initial talent, Mozart was also an aritsta who learned to work on his work, and then improved. At this point, he shares things with us all. Artists get better at sharpening their skills or acquiring new skills; they get better at learning to work and learning from their own work work. They commit to their work and act upon that commitment. So when you ask, "Then why does not it come easy for me?", The answer is probably, "Because making art is difficult!". What you end up caring about is what you do your art, it did not come easy or difficult.

Luís Horácio

Plastic artist and curator.