Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard

Aphorism #69

Making art is like swimming underwater while wearing a blindfold.

When you are truly making art you are out of this world, with all its safeties and certainties. By being free of real peril, art making plunges you into a simulation of peril, where you anxiously thrash about with little to guide you but your experience, a sense of purpose and an often uncooperative, mutating thing staring back at you.

If you think you know what you are doing, you are probably fooling yourself. And if you are a real artist you do it anyway.

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