art & fear by david bayles and ted orland

The book is brief, an easily digestible 122 pages, and offers many opportunities for deeper contemplation. It’s refreshingly absent of psycho-babble or opaque art-speak. We get to see our behaviours and reactions observed from a new and more helpful angle. If you want a ‘how to’ book, look elsewhere. They give you no exercises, plans or solutions.

Its a pithy, though comforting read, written by artists, and gets straight down to what can hinder our development as artists, and why. Doubt-ridden and fearful, we watch as our paints gather dust.

No surprise then, that for some of us, making art can feel fraught, dangerous, and too revealing. Tracking this perilous trajectory, when you make no art at all, you are no person at all. Trying to make art outside college, in a world where our work might be rarely seen, commented on, or encouraged: navigating the making of art within our ‘I’ culture, where art has become an expression of self: ergo, making flawed art = you are a flawed person. Labels like ‘talented’ or ‘gifted’ quickly trip us up when the going gets tough. Hang-ups about being creative can reach way back into childhood: parents can unwittingly stymie their child’s imagination, and research now shows that teachers generally dislike their more creative students (however much they insist to the contrary). But really, making art? For many of us, however, it is familiar territory. Fear getting a life-changing illness = certainly.

Fear when jumping out of plane at altitude = more than likely. That art-making can induce fear might be hard for some people to wear. Considering that artists David Bayles and Ted Orland published it under their own steam in 1991, and the book’s sales have since grown by word of mouth advertising alone, it has earned its reputation for being a useful, underground classic. Seventeen years after it was first published, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking has now sold over 180,000 copies. We have met the enemy, and he is us‘ (Pogo, 1970)

Art & fear by david bayles and ted orland