Art is exquisitely responsive. Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art. The work we make, even if unnoticed and undesired by the world, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it - or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction to what we do; in out artwork there is nothing but reaction.
The breathtakingly wonderful thing about this reaction is its truthfulness. Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But hwen you commit, it comes on like blazes. (p.49)

In the ideal- that is to say, real - artist, fears not only continue to exist, they exist side by side with the disires that complement them, perhaps drive them, certainly feed them. Naive passion, which promotes work done in ignorance of obstacles, becomes-with courage-informed passion, which promotes work done in full acceptance of those obstacles.
Formost among those obstacles is uncertainty. We all know the feeling of finished art that rides from within its unceretainies.(p.50)

our most personal histories hold crystalline memories of absorption into evocative work.

If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment. Indeed, our own work is so inextricably tied to time and place that we cannot recapture even our own aesthetic ground of past times. Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work.

This heightened self-consciousness was rarely an issue in earlier times when it seemed self-evident that the artist (and everyone else, for that matter) had roots deeply intertwining their culture. Meanings and distinctions embodied within artworks were part of the fabric of everyfday life, and the distance from art issues to all other issues was small. THe whole population counted as audience when artists' work encompassed everything from icons for the Church to untensils for the home.

Today art issues have for the most part become solely the concern of artists, divorced from -and ignored by - the larger community.Today artists often back away from engaging the times and places of their life, choosing instead the largely intellectual challenge of engaging the times and places of art.(p.54)

There's a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.(p.55)

Nominees for Leading Role in a Continuing Artists' Funk are
(1) you've entirely run out of new ideas forever,
or
(2) you've been following a worthless deadend path the whole time.
And the winner is neither.

One of best kept secrets of artmaking is that new ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas-ideas that can be re-used for a thousand cariations, supplying the framework of a whole body of work rather than a single piece.
The promoise of paths not taken is that our work is really more than it appears, that it would shine through better if only things had been a little bit different.(p.56)

When things go haywire, your best opening strategy might be to return-very carefully and consciously- to the habits and practices in play the last time you felt good about your work.Return to the space you drifted away from and the work will return as well.(p.57)

Working within the self-imposed discipline of a particular form eases the prospect of having to reinvent yourself with each new piece. The discovery of useful fomrs is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons.

Only the maker (and then only with time) has a chance of knowing how important small conventions and rituals are in the practice of staying at work. The private details of artmaking are utterly uninteresting to audiences, perhaps because they're almost never visible-or even knowable-from examining the finished work.

The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over- and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful. A peice of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns(p.61)

To see far is one thing: going ther is another.
-Brancusi (p.65)