How to Be an Artist

You are always learning. At the end of each day, you know something you didn't know at the beginning. We're all learning on the job. This is true even when the thing you've learned is that you know less than you thought.

But doubt is a sign of faith: it tests and humbles you, allows newness into your life. Best of all, doubt banishes the stifling effect of certainty. Certainty kills curiosity and change.

Bad art teaches you as much as good art, maybe more.

For now, make something, learn something, and move on. Or you’ll be buried waist-deep in the big muddy of perfectionism.

Surely, your crappy art can fake out twelve stupid people. I've seen it done with one or two.

Every work of art is a culturescape of you, your memories, the moments you spent working, your hopes, energies, and neuroses, the times you live in, and your ambitions. Of the things that are engaging, mysterious, meaningful, resistant over time.

Artists must also reckon with the uncanny feeling that by the time we’ve finished a new work, we’ve often ended up creating something different from what we set out to do. This feeling of surprise, of the unexpected, can delight or disappoint us. … The creative process is an inexplicable, inspired, crystallizing place where the artist becomes an audience to the work, almost doesn’t know where it came from.