Creative Process Quotes

“Great stories draw us into their world and never let go. They continue to influence us long after the last page or the rolling credits. They grow on us, becoming a part of us. They create shared experiences, allowing us to build bridges with others and form communities. Behind their magic lies a science—something we can study, understand, and master.”
― Will Raywood, The Natural Laws of Story: Master the Art and Science of Engaging Narratives

“AI is an abomination of creativity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Either you are an artist or you use AI, you cannot do both.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“I have zero tolerance for the use of AI in any aspect of human creative endeavor. We can make a separate space for AI art, but AI trash passed as human art, is an abomination of creativity - for our imperfections bear the keynote of truth. Art is a testament to human struggle - remove the human, and it's art no more. Either you are an artist or you use AI, you cannot do both.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Art is a testament to human struggle – remove the human, and it’s art no more.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“We can make a separate space for AI art, but AI trash passed as human art, is an abomination of creativity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“If I don’t have blue, I’ll just use red.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Healing isn't becoming someone new, it's reclaiming the parts of you that were buried under survival.”
― Marbella barajas

“Let the creative process be a sacred unfolding of who you are meant to be”
― AshRawArt

“Imagination is sacred ground - a place where inspiration & revelation meet”
― AshRawArt

“Share your creative gifts. Because they are gifts.”
― Jen Knox, Chaos Magic

“The artist must create his works as though he would be the only soul to behold them, shards of his very self rendered into being. Otherwise he is simply an artisan, a merchant selling wares for coin at a market.”
― Ian St. Martin, Scions of the Emperor

“Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matter is the product: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matter is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it's dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“In fact there's generally no good reason why others *should* care about most of any one artist's work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential...The point is that you learn how to make your work *by making your work,* and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out *as finished art.*”
― David Bayles

“In fact there's generally no good reason why others ”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“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. In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. “Artist” has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful artmaking — from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours.

David Bayles. Art & Fear- Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (pp. 12-13). (Function). Kindle Edition.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“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. In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. “Artist” has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful artmaking — from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution — and it should be. Vision, Uncertainty, and Knowledge of Materials are inevitabilities that all artists must acknowledge and learn from: vision is always ahead of execution, knowledge of materials is your contact with reality, and uncertainty is a virtue.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Imagination is in control when you begin making an object. The artwork’s potential is never higher than in that magic moment when the first brushstroke is applied, the first chord struck. But as the piece grows, technique and craft take over, and imagination becomes a less useful tool. A piece grows by becoming specific.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“It’s the same for all media: the first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting — they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one — and only one — possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done. That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss — the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken.
...Designer Charles Eames, arguably the quintessential Renaissance Man of the twentieth century, used to complain good-naturedly that he devoted only about one percent of his energy to conceiving a design — and the remaining ninety-nine percent to holding onto it as a project ran its course. Small surprise. After all, your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute — but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible. A finished piece is, in effect, a test of correspondence between imagination and execution. And perhaps surprisingly, the more common obstacle to achieving that correspondence is not undisciplined execution, but undisciplined imagination. It’s altogether too seductive to approach your proposed work believing your materials to be more malleable than they really are, your ideas more compelling, your execution more refined. As Stanley Kunitz once commented, “The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.” And it’s true, most artists don’t daydream about making great art — they daydream about having made great art.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“It’s altogether too seductive to approach your proposed work believing your materials to be more malleable than they really are, your ideas more compelling, your execution more refined.

....some materials are so readily charged and responsive that artists have turned to them for thousands of years, and probably will for thousands more. For many artists the response to a particular material has been intensely personal, as if the material spoke directly to them....

But where materials have potential, they also have limits. Ink wants to flow, but not across just any surface; clay wants to hold a shape, but not just any shape. And in any case, without your active participation their potential remains just that — potential. Materials are like elementary particles: charged, but indifferent. They do not listen in on your fantasies, do not get up and move in response to your idle wishes....

What counts, in making art, is the actual fit between the contents of your head and the qualities of your materials. The knowledge you need to make that fit comes from noticing what really happens as you work — the way the materials respond, and the way that response (and resistance) suggest new ideas to you. It’s those real and ordinary changes that matter. Art is about carrying things out, and materials are what can be carried out.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“In making art you need to give yourself room to respond authentically, both to your subject matter and to your materials. Art happens between you and something — a subject, an idea, a technique — and both you and that something need to be free to move.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“After all, wanting to be understood is a basic need — an affirmation of the humanity you share with everyone around you. The risk is fearsome: in making your real work you hand the audience the power to deny the understanding you seek; you hand them the power to say, “you’re not like us; you’re weird; you’re crazy.” And admittedly, there’s always a chance they may be right — your work may provide clear evidence that you are different, that you are alone. After all, artists themselves rarely serve as role models of normalcy....

Just how unintelligible your art — or you — appear to others may be something you don’t really want to confront, at least not all that quickly. What is sometimes needed is simply an insulating period, a gap of pure time between the making of your art, and the time when you share it with outsiders. Andrew Wyeth pursued his Helga series privately for years, working at his own pace, away from the spotlight of criticism and suggestion that would otherwise have accompanied the release of each new piece in the series. Such respites also, perhaps, allow the finished work time to find its rightful place in the artist’s heart and mind — in short, a chance to be understood better by the maker. Then when the time comes for others to judge the work, their reaction (whatever it may be) is less threatening.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all....

On both intellectual and technical grounds, it’s wise to remain on good terms with your artistic heritage, lest you devote several incarnations to re-inventing the wheel. But once having allowed for that, the far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future....

The unfolding over time of a great idea is like the growth of a fractal crystal, allowing details and refinements to multiply endlessly — but only in ever-decreasing scale. Eventually (perhaps by the early 1960’s) those who stepped forward to carry the West Coast Landscape Photography banner were not producing art, so much as re-producing the history of art....

Only those who commit to following their own artistic path can look back and see this issue in clear perspective: the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as ”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker....As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand — yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion — to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place...they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles “appropriated” from other places and times.

A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“And when the work is going well, why on earth would we want to know? Most of the myriad of steps that go into making a piece (or a year’s worth of pieces) go on below the level of conscious thought, engaging unarticulated beliefs and assumptions about what artmaking is...We rarely think about how or why we do such things — we just do them. Changing the pattern of outcome in your work means first identifying things about your approach that are as automatic as wedging the clay, as subtle as releasing the arrow from the bow.

...We use predictable work habits to get us into the studio and into our materials; we use recurrent bits of form as starting points for making specific pieces.

....The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons...any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.
....The private details of artmaking are utterly uninteresting to audiences (and frequently to teachers), 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 piece of art is the surface expression of a life lived within productive patterns. Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become — like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka — inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“It’s easier to paint in the angel’s feet to another’s master-work than to discover where the angels live within yourself...Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.”
― David Bayles, Art and Fear

“The power of visual storytelling has always been my guiding light, and this book is a testament to that power. While my belief in it hasn’t changed, the process of creating this work has deepened my commitment to using my lens as a tool for change. Visual stories have the power to shift perspectives, challenge misconceptions, and inspire action.”
― Tieshka K Smith, Compositions of Black Joy: A Visual Chronicle of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival

“In the silence of solitude, my mirror sings my truth." – short movie My Mirror, My Only Echo”
― Yvonne Padmos