One was by W.H. Auden. “When a successful author,” Auden wrote, and here I think you can include all artist types, “analyses the reasons for his success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born with, and overestimates his skill in employing it.” James Baldwin thought otherwise: “Talent is insignificant…Beyond talent that lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels and idea. The artist acts urgently, often impulsively, on that idea but brings conscious rigor to the evaluation of what the imagination has spewed. Ultimately, experience, intellect, insight, and drive enable them to shape the work and then to edit it over and over, until that idea has been turned into a finished work. Each stage–the imaging, judging, and shaping–is important; one way or another, each entered these conversations.
When we hop on a bicycle, no part of us thinks that we’ll be able to win the Tour de France, but with art, we think if we’re not really good at it, we can’t, or shouldn’t, do it.
If anything seems universally true in this survey, it is that no matter how hard it gets, real artists do not give up.
They are artists because they are consumed with the making of art. Art is hard, and that is exactly what is so satisfying about it. Victories are fleeting. The struggle is every day.
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