Practicing Practice

Years ago, my friend Kevin suggested a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland called Art and Fear*, said it was a cult classic, and especially useful to someone like me (which is to say, a person who makes art and runs up against self-imposed barricades regularly). We were working together at the time. I was making an album called Parachute, he was overseeing things, so he had a front row seat to my insecurities.

Here’s how the book starts:

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 may get made once-a-century or so, good art gets made all the time.

In my tattered copy of the book, I’ve underlined that last phrase with two different colored pencils during two different readings as if to remind myself: good art gets made all the time.

Mozart-like art does not.

Later in the book (page 29) Bayles and Orland describe an experiment:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality….On the final day of class he would bring his bathroom scales in and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

You can probably guess the outcome. The quantity group created better pots. They spent more time making pots than thinking about making the perfect pot. They learned from their mistakes, got better at their potting skills, and maybe more importantly, got closer to the work they were meant to do; farther away from what was expected or what other potters had done before them.

I’m learning this lesson about quantity again for the hundredth time. Picking up a paint brush to learn something about watercolor, I’m reminded by my on-line teacher, Laura, that I have to practice a lot. Watercolor is hard, but every day I make a little progress, come up with something I like, something that makes me smile. More than anything, I’m grateful to be excited about something again; to want to get out of bed in the morning (or in my case, to stay up later at night).

The winter’s been long. There’s lots to fret about. I’d forgotten how important it is to make something, to try something new.

*Art and Fear is available on Amazon, but I hope you’ll order it from your local bookstore.

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Two birds on a wire, or is it a curb? I mean, the chick on the right’s feet aren’t even on what was supposed to be a wire! And the one on the left is more chicken than sparrow, but I like them both. I look at them and say to myself, hey, look at that! And saying that to myself is kind of thrilling.

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