Art and Fear

Yesterday I finished rereading Art and Fear.
This book.....essential - to any and every Maker. Visual Artist, Writer, Dancer, Musician....Essential.

It's an almost impossible book to write about - read the reviews on Amazon. They say it all better than I could... If you were to pick up my copy - it's battered and splattered with paint, and written in all over.
But essential.

From the first chapter, which you can read free on Amazon if you have a Kindle:

• Artmaking involves skills that can be learned. ...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 distinct.
• Art is made by ordinary people. ...our flaws and weaknesses, while often obstacles to our getting work done, are a source of strength as well.
• Making art and viewing art are different at their core. ...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.
• Artmaking has been around longer than the art establishment. ...the current view equating art with "self-expression" reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium. Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are.

  Now go - pick up your copy. It's worth the money and the time.