The Nature of the Problem (Art and Fear)

CH 1 The Nature of the Problem

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult.” – Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)

“Making art is difficult.”

That is the first sentence. It’s like a V8 moment, who is going to come out and smack your head like “Duh!”

But as simple a sentence, it is actually very true and very complex. Art is difficult. I don’t understand or “get” everything I see. I listen to people talk about the subtle hints of this and that the unspoken garbledy gook that they see in the piece because it is so open to interpretation that it can be anything you want it to be and so it is. And so it is art. Thus the process of making that art is equally as difficult. You have to take a journey. Guggenheim Fellow Betsy Schneider once said, “Art is not the process of going from A to B, it is going from A to X and the journey that takes you there.” That is as big a truth as any I have ever experienced. But WHY is it so difficult?

“Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed.”
This is true for me, I can imagine what it would look like, but How do you start to make it? The jumping off point is always the hardest for me. How do I start a project that I want to be so meaningful and fantastic…well I don’t. and then I wonder what happened to all the great ideas I had.

“It’s easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God than when working in the service of self.”
I’m sure that Michelangelo had bad days, I mean the Pope was kind of a dick about the Sistine chapel and all, but he did it. He accomplished some of the most amazing art the world has seen. He had a commission to make a place of holiness more beautiful and that would ensure he worked for the rest of his life. He had the benefactors to ensure he didn’t want for too much, oh how I would love to come across a modern day Medici. He had all kinds of opportunities for success in those olde days that we just don’t have the opportunity for these days.

“Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience or reward.”
Reality is a cold hearted bitch. The trick is to realizing that and moving forward anyway, like having to go to family dinner with that crabby relative you’d rather avoid and and getting home without saying anything rude back or physically harming them.

“Conrad’s view of Fatalism: namely, that it is a species of fear – the fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak.”
This is my greatest flaw. This is why I seek safe zones, this is why my life is mediocre at best.

“In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, …and in following your own voice.”
That voice that says MAKE ART! but doesn’t tell you how, or what, or why, it just knows it needs to make to breathe and accepting who you are and how you make work so you can work with yourself instead of against, so that you actually having something to hold and look at and improve upon.

“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.”
Makes quality work, not quantity work. 25 pages of contact sheets won’t help you make beautiful photos. It just shows you how much film you wasted. 1 or 2 good shots but of those “good shots” how many are exceptional? but again, we are making ordinary art, we aren’t Mozarts or Picassos or Van Goghs, we are ordinary, and in that ordinary we CAN make something extraordinary if we just keep swimming.

An Introduction to Art and Fear

Below is the introduction to the book, Art and Fear.

“This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people – essentially (statistically speaking) there aren’t any people like that. But while geniuses mat get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time. Making art is a common and innately human activity, filled with the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort. The difficulties Artmakers face are not remote and heroic, but universal and familiar.
This, then, is a book for the rest of us. Both authors are working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. The observations we make here are drawn from personal experience, and relate more closely to the needs of artists than to the interests of viewers. This book is about what it feel alike 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.”
–David Bayles, Ted Orland

Now isn’t that refreshing, right off the bat, Ordinary Art, who would have thought? There is this weight that sits on your shoulders that you have to make ART! something that is so extraordinary people can’t walk by it, you want to make something that passes the 10 second rule in a gallery. (The 10 second rule is making something so compelling a person will stand in front of it for at least 10 seconds.) Sadly most people do not delve into art. They feel a compulsion to be worldly and cultured and support the arts so they go to functions and look at things thy just don’t get and walk around the room going from piece to piece so swiftly they will most likely not remember what one single thing looks like.

Ordinary art, like the stuff we are all making on a daily basis. Like the stuff that you aren’t happy with that a friend will see and GUSH over how amazing it is. Ordinary art has a value and a place in the world; after all making it a more beautiful place should be applauded. Why is that so easy to forget? When did we all become obsessed with the need to be a Mozart, to make ART! instead of being happy with art.

I make art.

I am an art maker.

I am the vessel through which art is made.

Isn’t that significant?

That I can see the world in a way that makes the ordinary extraordinary? That I can capture images in such a way that people, if for just that few moments, stand in front of my photograph and feel something they otherwise wouldn’t have? That they experienced something new and exciting, and maybe that spurs them to keep going to art shows because I was able to create an image that evoked them to feel. That is a glorious thing that shouldn’t be overlooked, and yet it somehow often is.

The world is full of artists, so why am I special, especially when I graduated with 200 of them? Because I am still making art, where others have stopped, because I am still amazing by everyday things that I see and wonder about them. Because I am still a vessel through which art is made and that should be celebrated.

I may just be an artist. I may only ever make art. But what I have made has been celebrated by my peers and mentors and family and friends and even those strangers who were so moved by a piece they had to let me know that they loved it, that it hit a note with in them, that my art MEANT something to them. That is success. That is what I need to remember. Success comes in degrees, and I have achieved a small measure of it.

Onward and upward.

Art and Fear

I realize that i don’t blog very often but when I do I hope that whoever out there finds it enjoys the random and sporadic nature of my thoughts.

As I once again prepare to commit myself to the idea of Graduate School I realize that I need to boost myself. I had some moments of self clarity recently and realize that I need to not only acknowledge my shortcomings but address them and work through them.

As a young and relatively successful artist I have fallen into a safe zone. I realize I didn’t fight hard enough against the injustice of being told I wouldn’t get a promised letter of recommendation 1 week before the deadlines to the schools i was applying to. I had no back up plan. I was “safe” again. I realized that I am afraid of a successful future. How long can it last, when will the other boot drop? It’s safe here, why leave? What happens with success? You need to continue to be successful in order to stay relevant. Can I be that person? Can I fight for a place that is filled with so many outstanding artists? My direct peer group is so saturated with awesome, how can I possibly stand out? But I did, a few times. My work has been in successful shows. It has won awards. I have received wonderful praise from people i admire and look up to but I still question the worth of that praise.

Maybe it was growing up the youngest and only girl in a house full of boys. They wanted me to be unseen and unheard, yet my parents fostered my creative side. I spent my summers taking art classes that my parents paid for, I sang in choir, I played an instrument, I was in dance. I took photography and general art classes in Jr high and High school. My life was filled with art.

I almost majored in drawing, but I figured that was even less lucrative than photography so switched gears and mediums. Digital photography. Fancy.

I earned a BFA, I graduated with friends, my family proudly looking on, and yet no prospects, No jobs in my related field, everyone else was getting those. No Grad school either, I didn’t have a portfolio strong enough to submit My work was too varied. So I went back to the local CC. It was safe. My life stalled out. Its been 2 years since I graduated, 8 months since my last show.

I am floating.

I am tired of Floating. I need to take my life back. I let myself have the summer to wallow and be a free loader. Now its time to take my life back. Apply at jobs I think are below me because at the end of the day a paycheck is a paycheck, doesn’t matter where the money comes from and humility is a lesson best learned now.

I need to take back my photography by addressing this inadequacy I feel regarding my work.

I recently asked a very talented professional photog friend, the kind that get’s hired by Elle and Cande Nast Traveler and people in Bahrain to take photos because he is effing amazing, for advice on an upcoming portrait session shoot that kept changing parameters every time the mom called me. Afterwards I was LITERALLY AFRAID to show him the results. Afraid that he would lose respect for me. just your basic everyday family portraits. I was sick to my stomach thinking he would tell me to sell my camera. His work is so gorgeous. How can these pictures even compare. Well they can’t. That’s the point. Apples and Oranges, and he loved the portraits. Said they were great and the family should love them. No BSing. It made me feel silly after to think how in knots I was over that. He even brought it up that I needn’t have worried, he knew I had talent. So I felt safer, braver. Sent him some other photos, obviously those I deemed best from other shoots. He loved them too. Said the clients would be thrilled. It helped me to earn back a measure of self assurance. Portraits are new for me so I feel out of my element and thus question my end results. Just gotta keep the faith. Breathe.

My Junior year of college I found out about this magical little book called Art and Fear; Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking, by Bayles and Orland. It is something every art maker should own. It is 122 pages of self help for a person that has self doubts, or concerns. I certainly have my fair share a lot of which I recently realized. I have decided to blog about each section of this book and my issues there in. Hopefully along the way I will rediscover that passionate spirit that lead me to this place. That thing that said MAKE ART while I was looking into degrees that would actually be lucrative. That thing I couldn’t ignore.

Day 5 (late) first/last 10am

This was the first piece of mail I saw when leaving for work at 10am and the last thing you ever want to get. Ever.

Day 4 Still/Strangers

I have been sick with a head cold that hit me like a Mack truck today so I wasn’t able to venture out for the strangers aspect, so I took a photo of a movie I was watching that I rather enjoy since I’ve never met the actors they are strangers and the photo counts as a movie still 🙂

Day 3 photo challenge

Day 3, motion/hands

More photo challenges

So in addition to my friends photo-a-day challenge there is the wide spread random one that is also going on, I have decided that I am going to COMBINE the two and see what happens! Here is todays, Day 2 image Color and Words

Day 1 Full/Empty

Day 1 photo is full/empty I could have been all poetic about it….but decided to do this instead.

February Photo A Day Challenge.

*Update – 02/02/11 I have added a second generic challenge to this post that I will also be partaking in!

My friend Adrian of Adrian Loves Owls wanted to do a photo a day challenge for Feb and since I missed the one in January I decided to partake. If you happen to read this silly blog thing I am trying to do and like the idea of a daily challenge, then join in!

p is for professional

so i recently came across a youtube channel that does satirical photographer vlogs. It was amusing and aggravating at the same time because, it really showed what people think about photography and how ‘easy’ it is…

Lesson one, if you think a photograph and a picture are the same thing, you are NOT a photographer, and there is a website just for you. http://www.youarenotaphotographer.com it makes me laugh.

Lesson two if you think that anything the lady in the first link says is true or you have done that…. refer to the link in lesson one.

photography is a CRAFT that you have to hone much like a sculptor or an electrician, you cannot buy a thrift store camera and call yourself a professional photographer and have it mean something, all you are doing is degrading the good name of my profession.

When you show up at my best friend’s outside night-time wedding with a camera that has a pop up flash….you are degrading the good name of my profession, but that is another blog…

take the camera you just bought so you can become a professional and do us all a favor, GO LEARN HOW TO BE A PROFESSIONAL!

Contact professionals in the area who take photographs that you still refer to as pictures, that you are IN LOVE WITH and ask if you can assist them for FREE! YES, I SAID FOR FREE, you are not worth anything to them, you have no experience you need to learn, so assisting a professional for free, getting experience with their equipment and learning what it does, learning the tricks of the trade you want to get into with your cheap camera that you will realize you need to upgrade, or the professional camera you just didn’t need because it’s too much camera for the everyday things you d,o and learn how they work, learn what an F Stop is, Learn how shutter speed and F stops relate to each other and how throwing on that thing called ISO affects those as well. Learn how to use a strobe for night-time outside weddings, how a diffused light makes the photos so much nicer to look at than the tiny glaring bulb from your pop up flash. Learn what diffused means. the point is TO LEARN!

Take that FREE knowledge you got and then apply it, do free or relatively cheap photo sessions with your friends and family and apply what you have learned. Make a portfolio from that and use it as your passport show people that you have equipment and some knowledge and then you can expect to be paid, maybe not much because hey, you just started, but at least it will be something and more experience; more knowledge. LEARN YOUR CRAFT don’t just say you are a professional because you charge people money and wing it. ACTUALLY BE A PROFESSIONAL.

Don’t tarnish the good name of my profession. Go learn. in the words of Bill Jay, ‘Always leave a photographic situation the same or better than when you found it.’ Meaning, don’t call yourself a professional and take crappy photos for $400 then call it a day while you are leaving people with your crap, know what you are doing and take the best possible photos you can because you are charging for them, people have expectations when money is involved. Don’t let them down.