'making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself'

'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 long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds that 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?

These questions, which seem so timeless, may actually be particular to our age. It may have been easier to paint bison on the cave walls long ago that to write this (or any other) sentence today. Other people, in other times and places, had some robust institutions to shore them up: witness the Church, the clan, ritual, tradition. It's easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God than when working in the service of self.

Not so today. Today almost no-one feels shored up. Today artwork does not emerge from a secure common ground; the bison on the wall is someone else's magic.

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. This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.'

David Bayles  & Ted Orland, 1993, Art and Fear

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