Quotes from David Bayles

THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE ART might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. It's a genuine tragedy. Worse yet, it's an unnecessary tragedy. After all, artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional

But is the Mona Lisa really art? Well then, what about an undetectably perfect copy of the Mona Lisa? That comparison (however sneaky) points up the fact that it's surprisingly difficult, maybe even impossible, to view any single work in isolation and rule definitively, "This is art" or "This is craft." Striking that difference means comparing successive pieces made by the same person. In

vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.

What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.

As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In

It's easier to paint the angel's feet to another masterwork than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

THOSE WHO WOULD MAKE ART might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit.

Artists come together in the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice their art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share.

Making art is a common and intimately human activity, filled with all the perils (and rewards) that accompany any worthwhile effort.

This book is about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do.

Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: How does art get done? Why, often, does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?

But while talent—not to mention fate, luck and tragedy—all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis.

If art is made by ordinary people, then you'd have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess.

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

When your only tool is a hammer, so the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.

Sometimes to see your work's rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light. What

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.

We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells into art?

To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience.

To the viewer, who has little emotional investment in how the work gets done, art made primarily to display technical virtuosity is often beautiful, striking, elegant...and vacant.

But while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it's still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal — a "right answer" — than to give form to a new idea. It's easier to paint in the angel's feet to another's master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself.

The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

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

The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.