Quotes from David Bayles

You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good, the parts that aren't yours. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's also called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around.

Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.

To the artist, all problems of art appear uniquely personal. Well, that's understandable enough, given that not many other activities routinely call one's basic self-worth into question.

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

When you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.

Art is a high calling – fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others – indeed as anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit.

fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.

In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.

Art is human. Error is human. Art is error.

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.

ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art.

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.

To require perfection is to invite paralysis.

What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative or melody — only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata. The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

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: unless your work continually generates new and unresolved issues, there's no reason for your next work to be any different from the last.

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 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.

Most of us spend most of our time in other peoples' worlds — working at predetermined jobs, relaxing to pre-packaged entertainment — and no matter how benign this ready-made world may be, there will always be times when something is missing or doesn't quite ring true.

But the important point here is not that you have — or don't have — what other artists have, but rather that it doesn't matter. Whatever they have is something needed to do their work — it wouldn't help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don't lack it. You don't need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period. EXPECTATIONS

Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

Between the initial idea and the finished piece lies a gulf we can see across, but never fully chart. The truly special moments in artmaking lie in those moments when concept is converted to reality — those moments when the gulf is being crossed.

And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way: they get eaten. In society it's a bit more complicated. Nonetheless the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society, nature, and artmaking tend to produce guarded creatures.

Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.

It's been a tough century for modesty, craftsmanship and tenderness.