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Referencing Art & Fear
4 years ago
- on the insurmountable pressure of high expectations.
There is a book I like to go back to when I feel unable to make art - Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking Taschenbuch by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It is a great book. However, it only mentions and presents no solutions for one very ordinary problem: Making money. Where it excels is putting your mind at ease on getting your work done. Allowing you to create art that may or may not ever have someone care for it; to give you confidence to create what you want to create and make something that truly matters to yourself. People who care about you will care about art that matters to you. Taxes, social security and healthcare don't care about you. They want money.
Here lies a difficulty that seems insignificant to some and insurmountable to others. There used to be a videogame critic named John Bain. Something memorable about his personality was that he never wanted donations; he didn’t want money from his fans without giving a tangible and useful service in return. It's not a unique mindset. Many people have a sense of pride that makes feeling like a beggar the most undesirable feeling they can imagine. Many would rather be dead than be a burden on others. The opposite personality that allows people to take money without regret, to be greedy with the conviction that they always deserve the money most, doesn’t present the struggle I want to describe here. Making money with art becomes a lot harder, if you care about giving people something useful in return for their money. The use of a digital painting is a lot less tangible than the use of a car. The use of a painting that didn't meet the clients expectations is often hard to justify at all. Can you justify taking money for giving nothing useful at all?
And yet you put in a lot of work. Not just the hours spent creating the piece, also the hours learning how to create something that most can not create. If you're an exceptional artist, maybe even something only you could ever create. Your time is limited. You need the money to stay alive. You should even see many people genuinely appreciate the piece you created. They want you to continue. They want you to create more. Every time you don't post a piece of art to capture someone's attention for a few minutes, they will instead scroll down further on social media and read more posts to make them feel more miserable and cynical. Without art depicting the spectrum of what trans people can look like and what it means to be nonbinary, those concepts most likely would be far less understood. If you didn't demonstrate that it's possible for you to learn how to create great things, then there would have been others who never got inspired to create something great themselves too. Your work has value. It does make the world better. But still... is that useful?
Not everyone who benefits from your art will pay you. A commission comes with the idea that someone has a use for a creation and will pay you to be it’s creator. Others may very well have uses for the creation too; even more people will benefit from it existing, but as tradition goes, only one person will pay for it. In turn, the artist only worries about that person for making money. Clients have expectations. Expectations you may or may not meet. If you don't want to be a beggar; a burden on others, how often can your mind stomach taking money from a client who expects to get something else? How often does your bank account allow you to spend more time to meet those expectations, or to pass on the payment for some peace of mind?
The book Art & Fear raises an important point on this topic. To attempt perfection in art will only lead you to create no art at all. They quote Ansel Adams: “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good!” You start getting paralized by the fear of making mistakes and end up procrastinating. If you’re a plummer and fix a leak, you know it’s done when the water stays in the pipe. If an artist thinks that their work is done, once the client is satisfied, they can always find some dissatisfaction leaking through in the client’s reaction. You need a quantifiable cut off point. You need to know that you’re done.
Once your work is done, you need compensation. Do not shoulder all the mistakes of others. If someone built a new house and let the plumber lay pipes to a room just to realize that they marked the wrong room to be the bathroom, then the plumber’s work is still done. The plumber made no mistake. Unreal expectations are easy to come by. As an artist, the best you can do is to make clear to the client exactly what you’re going to do. Don’t let them hope for greatness beyond what you make. Don’t just ask them what they want, tell them what you will do and do nothing more.
An aspect of fear, which I personally still seek to overcome, is that potential clients might see my most laborious pieces and expect something equivalent. This comes in small, with pieces of the same commission type. I would liken it to power creep in video games. When developers make all new content at least as powerful as the strongest existing content, because of the fear, that otherwise players might not find it useful. For an artist that might be the fear that when one piece works especially well with little effort, that every following piece has to work at least as well, even if it takes more effort. Otherwise the client might be disappointed. This problem can also come in large. The complexity of a painting can range from 1 hour of painting to 100 hours of work to create a finished piece. What if the simple pieces pale in comparison to the great pieces? What if the easy looks bad compared to the great? What if you develop a fear of making exceptional art, because you still need to sell mediocre work to survive?
That leads to the question, if maybe commissions are not for artists with that mindset described at the beginning. Then, what else would be? They might enable a donation button, make a ko-fi or patreon, but end up never advertising it. Asking for donation is not something everyone feels comfortable doing. The artist might not want to spoil the feeling of a personal piece by asking for donations at the end of it’s description. Or they might not want to annoy people with advertising themselves and rather focus on earning that attention/money purely through the art they produce. Maybe they fear those with the compassion to want to help an artist might need the money more than the artist. It doesn’t matter. They’re all just excused spawned from fear.
And here I am at the end, still with no solution to the problem. There are plenty of reasons to justify why you should take money from people. Money will allow you to make more art. That art will make the world better than if you didn’t make it. Advertising your work also is beneficial, because it diverts attention from other ads, which would lead people to invest into products that destroy the environment instead. But fear doesn’t listen to reason. Fear makes up it’s own reasons. Every single moment you sit there doing nothing, your fear just finds more fuel. Your fear feels more justified with every moment you waited and didn’t get hurt. Fear wins with every moment it brings you closer to death doing nothing. How long have you been avoiding actually doing what you know you should be doing?
Time passes no matter what. Make use of it.
There is a book I like to go back to when I feel unable to make art - Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking Taschenbuch by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It is a great book. However, it only mentions and presents no solutions for one very ordinary problem: Making money. Where it excels is putting your mind at ease on getting your work done. Allowing you to create art that may or may not ever have someone care for it; to give you confidence to create what you want to create and make something that truly matters to yourself. People who care about you will care about art that matters to you. Taxes, social security and healthcare don't care about you. They want money.
Here lies a difficulty that seems insignificant to some and insurmountable to others. There used to be a videogame critic named John Bain. Something memorable about his personality was that he never wanted donations; he didn’t want money from his fans without giving a tangible and useful service in return. It's not a unique mindset. Many people have a sense of pride that makes feeling like a beggar the most undesirable feeling they can imagine. Many would rather be dead than be a burden on others. The opposite personality that allows people to take money without regret, to be greedy with the conviction that they always deserve the money most, doesn’t present the struggle I want to describe here. Making money with art becomes a lot harder, if you care about giving people something useful in return for their money. The use of a digital painting is a lot less tangible than the use of a car. The use of a painting that didn't meet the clients expectations is often hard to justify at all. Can you justify taking money for giving nothing useful at all?
And yet you put in a lot of work. Not just the hours spent creating the piece, also the hours learning how to create something that most can not create. If you're an exceptional artist, maybe even something only you could ever create. Your time is limited. You need the money to stay alive. You should even see many people genuinely appreciate the piece you created. They want you to continue. They want you to create more. Every time you don't post a piece of art to capture someone's attention for a few minutes, they will instead scroll down further on social media and read more posts to make them feel more miserable and cynical. Without art depicting the spectrum of what trans people can look like and what it means to be nonbinary, those concepts most likely would be far less understood. If you didn't demonstrate that it's possible for you to learn how to create great things, then there would have been others who never got inspired to create something great themselves too. Your work has value. It does make the world better. But still... is that useful?
Not everyone who benefits from your art will pay you. A commission comes with the idea that someone has a use for a creation and will pay you to be it’s creator. Others may very well have uses for the creation too; even more people will benefit from it existing, but as tradition goes, only one person will pay for it. In turn, the artist only worries about that person for making money. Clients have expectations. Expectations you may or may not meet. If you don't want to be a beggar; a burden on others, how often can your mind stomach taking money from a client who expects to get something else? How often does your bank account allow you to spend more time to meet those expectations, or to pass on the payment for some peace of mind?
The book Art & Fear raises an important point on this topic. To attempt perfection in art will only lead you to create no art at all. They quote Ansel Adams: “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good!” You start getting paralized by the fear of making mistakes and end up procrastinating. If you’re a plummer and fix a leak, you know it’s done when the water stays in the pipe. If an artist thinks that their work is done, once the client is satisfied, they can always find some dissatisfaction leaking through in the client’s reaction. You need a quantifiable cut off point. You need to know that you’re done.
Once your work is done, you need compensation. Do not shoulder all the mistakes of others. If someone built a new house and let the plumber lay pipes to a room just to realize that they marked the wrong room to be the bathroom, then the plumber’s work is still done. The plumber made no mistake. Unreal expectations are easy to come by. As an artist, the best you can do is to make clear to the client exactly what you’re going to do. Don’t let them hope for greatness beyond what you make. Don’t just ask them what they want, tell them what you will do and do nothing more.
An aspect of fear, which I personally still seek to overcome, is that potential clients might see my most laborious pieces and expect something equivalent. This comes in small, with pieces of the same commission type. I would liken it to power creep in video games. When developers make all new content at least as powerful as the strongest existing content, because of the fear, that otherwise players might not find it useful. For an artist that might be the fear that when one piece works especially well with little effort, that every following piece has to work at least as well, even if it takes more effort. Otherwise the client might be disappointed. This problem can also come in large. The complexity of a painting can range from 1 hour of painting to 100 hours of work to create a finished piece. What if the simple pieces pale in comparison to the great pieces? What if the easy looks bad compared to the great? What if you develop a fear of making exceptional art, because you still need to sell mediocre work to survive?
That leads to the question, if maybe commissions are not for artists with that mindset described at the beginning. Then, what else would be? They might enable a donation button, make a ko-fi or patreon, but end up never advertising it. Asking for donation is not something everyone feels comfortable doing. The artist might not want to spoil the feeling of a personal piece by asking for donations at the end of it’s description. Or they might not want to annoy people with advertising themselves and rather focus on earning that attention/money purely through the art they produce. Maybe they fear those with the compassion to want to help an artist might need the money more than the artist. It doesn’t matter. They’re all just excused spawned from fear.
And here I am at the end, still with no solution to the problem. There are plenty of reasons to justify why you should take money from people. Money will allow you to make more art. That art will make the world better than if you didn’t make it. Advertising your work also is beneficial, because it diverts attention from other ads, which would lead people to invest into products that destroy the environment instead. But fear doesn’t listen to reason. Fear makes up it’s own reasons. Every single moment you sit there doing nothing, your fear just finds more fuel. Your fear feels more justified with every moment you waited and didn’t get hurt. Fear wins with every moment it brings you closer to death doing nothing. How long have you been avoiding actually doing what you know you should be doing?
Time passes no matter what. Make use of it.
Somehow people expect artists to be breatharians and sussist on the will to do art itself.
I have seen people utterly outraged at the prospect of paying for art.
sooo i believe that artists feeling like they do not deserve to be paid...
...is a very common thing. Unfortunately.
And your post brought me back dozen of memories of artists telling me their problems with accepting payment for art.
...or artists fighting to get paid with "customers" demanding free work.
For the first 6 pages of this comic the artist asked me 130$ because he litterally said "yeah, that's about what i am worth".
I am not saying 130$ per page, i am saying 130$ for the 6 pages.
I basically had to hammer into this artist that they were worth more.
Also got a little sad remembering TotalBiscuit, such a good guy and such a good advocate for consumer rights.
The thing I've personally come to recognize with art and the commerce of art is that it's all absolutely arbitrary -- same with popularity. You'll post a piece that you've put your heart and soul into only to find it gains no traction, yet the next piece you share which is a basic doodle ends up becoming a viral hit within your audience. You spend years sharing your art only get a trickle of followers, yet in a single day you can get retweeted by the right person and bam, you're overwhelmed by the sudden following. Art in the community sense feels more determined by luck and algorithms at times; it's near impossible to sell yourself and set expectations when it all feels so asinine.
I've seen incredibly talented people offer commissions at depressingly low rates only to still get ignored, meanwhile you see people selling quick and ugly adoptables for insane amounts of money.
Unfortunately, it feels the only way to truly succeed at being able to thrive off your art is to either sell commissions for hundreds of dollars on a near daily basis (~100 eur daily to just be above min wage), or to intentionally hide/deface your art with the intent of walling it away on Patreon. It's a business and skill sometimes seems to be a little part of that.
I appreciate that a lot of this is pretty pessimistic.
That said though, for expectations from commissioners -- as I alluded to, the success of artists is sometimes less about their skill and more about their popularity; in a strange way though, it should bring comfort that people who commission you will often do so because they want art from you, they enjoy the perspective that you have on the world and on their ideas. They want to see something of theirs realized by you and that's not really something you can disappoint them on unless you stop being yourself.
Sorry my thoughts are rather all over the place!
On another note, it definitely is good for the artists mind, if what they sell isn't a technical piece judged by the artistic skills and instead is more of a status symbol. There are artists out there who managed that. Then the exact content of a picture matters less than what the piece itself stands for. It's just sometimes it's hard to reason yourself into the mindset. xP
And don't worry. It was a long text. It's normal to have a lot of thoughts about it that aren't all necessarily related to each other. (:
thank you
All I can say is...and I'm still learning this, myself...it's better to make the attempt than to be left wondering IF. Break the big project into small pieces and do it a little at a time. Eventually it'll be done. Find support in those who love and care about you, and let their encouragement sink in. Encourage yourself, and remember that you don't have to be perfect the first time to still do good work.
As for not wanting to take people's money? No project is a waste of effort if it finds value in the eyes of another, and often, even if a piece isn't absolutely perfect, it is in the sense of one's character being given form that that value can be found in commissions. I, for one, am always appreciative of this and, while I don't frequently have money for commissions, I have no trouble paying it when I do, for it us the artist giving form to my creation, and in that there is great value to me.
There are so many ways the own brain can stop you from doing what you really want to do and that makes it just that much more valuable to see other artists as allies and share the struggles with stories about you overcame them. It's so much easier to fight, if you don't feel alone. :D