Book review of Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles

I just completed listening to Art and Fear by David Bayles as an audiobook an hour ago. It was quite a quick 'read', coming in at slightly over 3 hours. Quick impressions and whatever.

Bayles is an artist with decades of experience as a practitioner, a teacher, and thoroughly enmeshed in a community of art-adjacent people. He understands what triggers the creatives, their deepest fears and desires, and how they might be able to shape those in productive directions.

The thesis of the book is that Fear (of oneself, and of the audience) among artists is quite common, it never goes away no matter what level of accomplishment they reach, and might even be an integral part of the artistic creation process. He gives tips on how to overcome it, how to work with envy, jealousy, interest in commercializing and so forth. The first 2 hours are directly on the theme of the book, and the last hour is more a collection of short pieces on various aspects of the artistic lifestyle and how one might deal with them.

This book was clearly written by an artist for other practitioners. There's many nuggets of wisdom to find here, small and large, and it's a great book if one's struggling with creating anything at all and wants a book to provoke introspection and provide therapeutic validation of the difficulty of the process.

I really liked the book, loved that it was so short. I'd highly recommend it to anybody who's looking to read a book about inspiration, art or creativity.

Oh, there's this anecdote about a ceramics class where half the students are told  to make the best cup they can make over a semester, and the other half is told to make as many functional cups over the same time. This book is the origin of that anecdote, and it turns out it didn't really happen, it was more of an allegory the writer was using. Oh well. Still makes whole lotta sense.

9 out of ten stars.