Art & Fear: Don't Let Worries Stop Your Creativity

The book Art & Fear is a compact work with only 122 pages. But it lives up to its tagline, "An Artist's Survival Guide," and to its official subtitle: "Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking."

The book's co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, describe it as "a book about making art. Ordinary art." Their work is not aimed at the Mozarts of the world. Instead, it is written for "the rest of us" who strive to create works of art in many different forms on a daily basis.

"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 co-authors note. The challenge for artists is to learn how to continue working and creating in the face of these unavoidable troubles. We must learn "how to not quit," the writers point out.

"Fear that your next work will fail is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle," they emphasize.

"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."

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 an artist has no no clear idea what he or she is trying to create.

The $12.95 paperback is now published by Image Continuum Press, and it has been reprinted at least 19 times since it first appeared in 1994. Clearly, a lot of fearful artists have been reading it and recommending it to others.

-- Si Dunn