Part I

Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contrdiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.

ARTMAKING INVOLVES SKILLS THAT CAN BE LEARNED.

In large measure becoming artist consists of learnun to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive. Clearly, these qualities can be nurtured by others. Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from preseverance and lots of hard work.

ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE.

Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.

Your job is to learn to work on your work.

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.
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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.

Operating Manual For Not Quitting

1. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently.
2. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. (Look at it this way: If all goes well, MOMA will eventually come to you.)

What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.
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Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

In the non-art world, this belief system (follow your heart, and the audience will find you) is a driving mechanism behind the American Dream — and the Mid-Life Crisis. In the art world, it's a primary buffer against disillusionment. After all, the world does (in large measure) reward authentic work. The problem is not absolute, but temporal: by the time your reward arrives, you may no longer be around to collect it. Ask Schubert

For the artist, the dilemma seems obvious: risk rejection by exploring new worlds, or court acceptance by following wel-explored path.
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Make work that looks like art, and acceptance is automatic.

But once you allowed for that [drawing from your heritage, re-inventing the wheel], the far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future.

…the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as your art.

The difference between acceptance and approval is subtle, but distinct. Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like it.

For artists who thrive on confrontation, rejection is not a problem, but for many others the constant wear and tear takes a toll. For those artists, survival means finding an environment where art is valued and artmaking encouraged.

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldon in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the issue that really counts — namely, whether or not you're making progress in your work. They're in a good position to comment on how they're moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between your and your work.

Chapter 5: Finding Your Work

Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art.
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Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.

If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment.

There's a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman's hat except a Greek fisherman.

The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in a such way that your work gets done, over and over … and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived withing productive patterns.

Part II

Chapter 6

And so you make your place in the world by making a part of it … by contributing some new part to the set.
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Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.

The urge to compete provide a source of raw energy, and for that purpose alone it can be exceptionally useful. In a healthy artistic environment, that energy is directed inward to fulfill one's own potential. In a healthy artistic environment, artists are not in competition with each another. Unfortunately, healthy artistic environments are about as common as unicorns.

In not knowing how to tell yourself that your work is OK, you may be driven to the top of the heap in trying to get the rest of the world to tell you.
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Moreover, what's important about each new piece is not whether it is better or worse than your previous efforts, but the ways in which it is similar or different. The meaningful comparison between two Bach fugues is not how they rank, but how they work.
When things go really well in your artmaking, all the pieces you make have a life to them, regardless how they stack up as personal favourites. After all, they're all your babies. It can even be argued that you have and obligation to explore the possible variations, given that a single artistic question can yield many right answers. Productive times encourage you to build an extended body of work, one where all the pieces (even the flawed sketches that will never see the gallery wall) have a chance to play. In healthy times you rarely pause to distinguish between internal drive, sense of craft, the pressure of a deadline or the charm of a new idea — they all serve as sources of energy in the pieces you make.

Chapter 7

What artists learn from other artists is not so much history or technique (although we learn tons of that too); what we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage–by–association. Depth of contact grows as fears are shared — and thereby disarmed — and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits. To the artist, art is a verb.

Chapter 8

Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art deals with technique.

As the Zen proverb suggests, for the beginner there are many paths, for the advanced, few.
At any point along that path, your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits — without being trapped by it. The trap is perfection…

The difference between art and craft lies not in the tools you hold in your hand, but in the mental set that guides them. For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

Older work is ofttimes an embarrassment to the artist because it feels like it was made by a younger, more naive person — one who was ignorant of the pretension and striving in the work. Earlier work often feels, curiously, both too laboured and too simple. This is normal. New work is supposed to replace old work. if it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete — well, that's life.
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Old work tells you what you were paying attention to then; new work comments on the old by pointing out what you were not previously paying attention to.

Habits

Habits are the peripheral vision of the mind.

The theory is simple enough: respond automatically to the familiar, and you're then free to respond selectively to the unfamiliar. Applying that theory, however, is a bit dicier. Indulge too many habits, and life sinks into mind-dulling routine. Too few, and coping with a relentless stream of incoming detail overwhelms you.

…a useful working approach to making art: notice the objects you notice. Or put another way: make objects that talk — and then listen to them.

The need is to search among your repeated reactions to the world, expose those that are not true or useful, and change them. The remainder are yours: cultivate them.

At the outset, however, chances are that whatever theme and technique attracts you, someone has already experimented in the same direction. The is unavoidable: making any art piece inevitably engages the large themes and basic techniques that artists have used for centuries. Finding your own work is a process of distilling from each those traces that ring true to your own spirit.
Once developed, art habits are deep–seated, reliable, helpful, and convenient. Moreover, habits are stylistically important. In a sense, habits are style.
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Viewed closely, however, style is not a virtue, it is an inevitability — the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times.
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Style is the natural consequence of habit.

Chapter 9

The only work really worth doing — the only work you can do convincingly — is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art & fear.
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Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.