Challenges of Mastery – A Handbook for Emerging Artists

How can I minimize or prevent losing momentum upon reaching a goal?

Working towards a goal builds up momentum: the closer you get, the more worthwhile your efforts can feel. This momentum can get scattered by reaching a finishing line; instead of stabilizing your work rhythm and thus your artistic identity further (knowledge of progress, of having manifested something), it can lead to parts of your identity crumbling, to be replaced by a vacuum: who are you? Why are you?

The deeper your identification with goals and challenges, the harder their absence can hit you: having had an exhibition opening, having finished a difficult piece, having published a catalog of your work – accomplishments can generate a lack of structure, direction and purpose. A limbo. You accumulated knowledge, skill and will, but then seem to have lost the platform to invest it in.

Processes and goals

Since goals are usually singular, temporary events, it makes sense to rather focus on what accompanies you more permanently: the processes that lead to them. Habitualizing these turn them into your life’s permanent backbone: being in the studio on time, preparing the next work, putting in a certain number of hours every day. Goals can be harnessed for increased productivity and motivation, at the risk of experiencing a motivational low upon their attainment. By analyzing your personal experiences with processes and goals, you can establish a balance that benefits from using both.

Forming habits

The long-term solution here is to establish habits, which can start today: habits are formed by repeating your actions consistently, based on specific triggers: once you finished your cup of tea, you put it in the sink. Once you get out of bed, you make the bed. This works for every part of your life, including your artistic practice: once you brushed your teeth, you get dressed; once you got dressed, you leave for the studio; once you entered the studio, you turn off your phone’s notifications and put it aside; once you disabled your phone, you sit down to work for an hour. The banality of these actions, combined by stacking them together (“habit stacking”), results in a powerful approach to life (and work): since you get used to these sequences, you question them less. Since you question them less, you can focus on your work more efficiently.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri series, 18th century

Apart from your habits, there are a few further strategies to consider:

Establish reliable habits: To consistently come up with new ideas is your perpetual reality as an artist: let it become your routine. Instead of defining yourself through your achievements and goals, consider establishing processes that will become habitual – reducing the impact of reaching your goals. Since quality is the consequence of quantity (of the amount of time you invest), this approach can result in your work’s quality to increase as well.
Work on multiple pieces/projects in parallel: Experiment with working on parallel sets of production processes – with the intention of them not being finished at the same time (if they would, this might exacerbate the whole problem of losing momentum). Note that finishing a piece/project might require you to temporarily focus it exclusively. Experiment with the various ways of working in parallel to find out which work for you (staying within one medium; touching various media but sticking to an overarching topic; working on multiple independent projects or with different collaborators, etc).
Prepone preproduction: Instead of focussing on projects consecutively, experiment with preponing the preproduction phase of upcoming projects right into your current phase – even if those later projects are utopian and unconfirmed. This lets you think about them without actual pressure, which can be both enriching and empowering; once you do focus on them, you are already somewhat familiar with their parameters. This can result in a more soothing gradient into new domains, which can come in handy once the current project is done.
Generate a list of potential futures: Establish and maintain a list of potential research areas and future projects. Let this list include both full-blown projects (a work series, a collaboration, a body of work for an exhibition) as well as smaller fragments of investigation (researching specific tools, writing about your work, deepening your understanding about a previously untouched work aesthetic). Let this be your timeline of potential futures: you won’t ever be able to dive into all of them, but having them available in a rough overview will help you see the many areas of potential investigation. This will return agency to you, enabling you to look at these list of utopias, and engage with them.

Setting up process-based work habits will influence your attitude toward goals, and lets you use the best of “both worlds”: the streamlined reliability of habits as your structural backbone, mixed with the short motivational overdrive and bursts of peak performance offered by goals. Used adequately and sensitively, this can minimize your loss of momentum upon reaching goals.

I feel disassociated from my work. What can I do after having lost motivation or momentum?

There are endless reasons for artists to feel disassociated from their work: accomplishing something can lead to post-achievement depression; both success and failure can feed emotional isolation and doubts. If you lost motivation or momentum, your situation isn’t too different from that of someone who just starts out – both situations are based on doubts, featuring various ambiguities on how to get going. It can be worthwhile to revisit the chapters on how to start, focus, investigate and increase the pressure; in addition, consider the following strategies:

Create a list of previous artistic choices: While a finished piece can feel like an answer to its viewers, it also always represents an open set of questions to its creator. Every finished artwork carries these questions within itself; strands to pursue further, manifestations that may want additional, potentially better solutions. Go through your previous artworks and list the formal and semantic attributes used to create them: format, palette, movement, duration, speed; thoughts, influences, references, etc. Understand what happened in the works, and examine what touches you. Some choices might feel to be dead ends, while others might make you giddy. Having a list with your formal and semantic choices lets you remember your passion, and see where you could delve into next. A list of your previous artistic choices is a personal map of paths to pursue.
Be social: Meet friends to discuss your situation. This gives you a voice, and enables them to offer insights and empathy, which could strengthen you to move on. Alternatively, take time off: consider vacation (even a day without the internet and your smartphone can be blissful), consider going to the movies or a library etc. While working might have required a certain focus through isolation, now can be the time to rekindle family and friendships, and to understand how to better balance life and work in the future.
Be withdrawn: Experiment with introspection: meditation, visiting museums or the gym, listening to podcasts, reading: it can pay off to not surround yourself with other people’s energies, but to rather stay focused on yourself. This lets you dive into your situation, your art practice, or your medium’s history – which often serves as a reminder of the many paths untaken in our own artistic practice. Analyzing art that inspires you (including your own work!) can remind you of why you started making art in the first place.
Engage in side tasks: Even if you’re down, it might be possible to engage with low-commitment tasks: skimming through an older publication of your work, going through your archive. What about cleaning your studio, uncluttering your flat, making proper photos of your work or sorting your archive. These activities can enable your mind to wander, with the added benefit of getting work done. They can help you remember what you’ve accomplished so far, and create space to breathe and focus. Being exposed to sketches from several years ago (or even sorting your invoices while doing taxes) might help you remember previous efforts, and thus highlight future domains of investigation.
In case of a reached goal: post-process it: Depending on the goal you reached, now might be a good time to post-process what you did; this can include writing a diary entry, sending out a newsletter, updating your CV/website or social media, or letting gatekeepers/your network know about it.

I finished something and feel down. Shouldn’t I be happy and satisfied?

Working towards goals can lead to structure and focus, and enable peak performances: processes, collaborations and time schedules sometimes all work in unison towards accomplishing your targets. Streamlined work phases can be deeply and holistically satisfying: you know what to do, how to do it, and why you’re doing it. Even if your specific experience of working towards a goal is less positive, actually reaching a finishing line can easily influence your work structures negatively. Instead of experiencing bliss, you might experience hardships: your expectations might not be met (your hopes and ideas about what would happen upon reaching the goal), your structures might crumble (rented studios or tools need to be returned, collaborations with specific people end), and, if unlucky, a burnout might emerge as a result of the overtime you invested. While the idea of reaching goals is positive, its reality is often more ambiguous.

The value of your artistic practice

Understand that your previous satisfaction most likely came from pursuing your artistic practice while also having a goal towards which to work: you had a platform – one that required and rewarded your focus. Losing this platform is bound to result in frustration. While reaching your goal might have resulted in temporary happiness, the loss of momentum is often way more noticeable – which is why you need to get back to work and reestablish yourself: by reestablishing your artistic platform. For this, you don’t necessarily need a new project or goal: their lack doesn’t diminish the validity and importance of your artmaking practice. What’s relevant is for you to grasp the importance of your artistic practice as basis of your identity: you are an artist because you pursue an artistic practice. As long as you do this, you have a voice – which can ultimately lead to further visibility, projects and goals. Over an artist’s life, it seems most important to gradually minimize this loss of self. To this end, strong work habits seem the best strategy.

One step at a time..

For now though, if you feel unmotivated or depressed: take your time. Accept the challenge of your situation: to eventually get back to work. Focus on establishing a daily work habit in the spirit of beginner’s mind, and of reestablishing yourself as an artist (to yourself): you might have achieved a lot just days ago, and might have solved an insurmountable challenge. Yet with this challenge gone, you need to take care of the new one: to continue working. Instead of worrying about goals, focus on being the person who does specific actions: who’s in the studio on time, creates a clean studio, draws for fifteen minutes. Who stops before it gets to be too much.

Don’t expect yourself to work a full day; it’s OK to attend to (re-)forming the habit of simply getting to the studio at all. Considering the circumstances, achieving this isn’t nothing; it’s a lot. If you manage to get to the studio every day, you’ll eventually want to do more there. Small tasks is all it needs to get there: progress through tiny steps – without risking further self-alienation. Consider ritualizing the beginning: get dressed. Brush your teeth. Take your shoes on. Focus on the small, innocent steps without which no studio day can start. Once there, start cleaning. Read a book. Ignore your phone. Revisit unfinished work. Write down your thoughts, then leave for a walk: you’ve done enough. You managed to get dressed. You managed to get to the studio. It’s through the repetition of gradual, basic steps like this that you reestablish yourself.

Being without direction is part of the cycle

Your artistic practice is both opportunity and struggle. Whatever you create is what you get judged by – if not by others, then by yourself. Reaching a goal manifests your many inabilities, while removing your motivating force. To transcend this, strongly consider replacing a goal-based with a process-based approach. Once you understand life (and your artmaking) as a process, it’s easier to be OK with being stalled, to be without direction: it’s part of the endless artistic cycle. At the same time, don’t rush: you will develop subconscious inclinations on what to pursue next, similar to an athlete whose body aches to finally get back to training after a week’s vacation. To get back to a collector who was interested in your work, to call your gallery and meet for coffee, to visit friends or colleagues – or to do none of these, but simply stay home, watch a movie and sulk. It’s ok: this too shall pass.

Consider reading these strategies on how to continue your practice when feeling disassociated from it, and the various chapters on how to start (focusing, investigating, and increasing your commitment) your artmaking.

How do I find or establish quality in my work?

As an artist, your highest goal is to understand your own ideas of quality, to grow with and expand them. Your standards will keep changing, just as you do, and sometimes conflict with each other: some works will need to scream, while others will need to be silent. Some works will need to do both. Think of your quality criteria as a rhizome, something of depth and complexity, and endless connection points: like a symphony, or a plant with indefinite subterranean roots. Something that can incorporate varying ideas of strength and power without opposition or conflict: to be slow yet strong, dedicated yet open. Over time, you’ll understand overarching standards that encompass, include, and potentially replace your prior ones: where smoothness of movement might have been relevant initially, your focus might shift to full choreographies – and later return to the initial focus. Quality standards are ever-shifting, just as you are. They will morph along your moods and life phases, carrying the potential for endless surprises.

XIV piano piece for David Tudor 4, by Sylvano Bussoti (1980); from “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”

How to Find Quality in Your Work

You establish your quality ideals by mindfully immersing yourself into art, and life. They are a consequence of all your aesthetic and semantic preferences, including all your affinities and actual capabilities. The more sensitive you are about understanding what matters to you (media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content), the more likely you’ll establish ideals that suit you. You’re never bound by current limitations though: your today’s capabilities can change tremendously, based on your willingness to invest time and effort.

Whenever you create something, you also form a value judgement: about what worked, and what didn’t. About what moved you, or moved you too much, or didn’t move you enough. About what was too bright, too large or too slow. About the little things that might require change to result in something to feel perfect: sounds, movements, traction; density and weight; haptics and fluidity, etc. The same is true when experiencing the world: what food, hobbies, politics or social agendas you care about. Quite obviously, your affinities are deeply personal – yet your choices can sidestep them: you might like something, but decide against it; your bias might exist on a general level, but not specifically when discussing the current artwork.

Art History

While your quality criteria are yours to establish, art has a tremendous history of choices. The more you know about them, the better you will be able to connect to someone else’s choices, and continue or transcend what’s been established before you. Doing so changes your art practice from the pursuit of pure personal expression, to the proactive advance of a medium’s history. While artworks always focus on something, this adds another focus point: art history. As such, it defines your way of interacting with art per se, putting it on the same level as worldly topics. Understand that your focus on art history can lead to art that unbalancedly cares about the past – any of your choices can have the (subconscious) intention to find a secure hiding spot, a place to rest. These rarely exist in the arts, which benefit from courageous approaches. The challenge is to find a way to incorporate your self-expression in a way that reflects the past, and potentially helps to bring it into the future. For this, your references don’t have to be obvious or explicit – they don’t even have to be understood. By existing in your mind, and during the creation process, the artwork usually creates a spin that sticks, an aura that’s hard to describe but there to be felt.

Hiking without a Compass

Consider hiking in unknown territories, without a compass to guide you. You might never reach your goal: every direction is equally feasible. You might want to rest and wait for help, but the endless horizons in each direction don’t promise anyone’s arrival anytime soon. Yet you could reach your goal by simply deciding on a direction, and by starting to walk. You might want to change directions after a while, potentially subverting your previous choices. You might notice life around your path as exciting yet worrying, and keep moving. While you’ve walked for a longer time already, you notice that there might never be a goal. You get frustrated, worried, fearful – until you realize that walking actually is the goal.

This is both worrying and liberating: instead of an external goal to get to, you understand to be embedded within one already. You don’t trust this insight too much though, and keep moving. Over the years, you realize that you can walk in all sorts of ways: slowly, gracefully, weirdly; you can crawl or walk backwards, you can even dance or whistle along the way. On really good days, you move according to your inner self, without any thoughts on how it might look like, or how incredibly stupid the whole act of walking might be. Your increasing awareness of the endless ways of moving let you understand that this pursuit of moving, of the various modes of walking, is what ultimately defines you.

The pursuit of a goal resulted in you walking, and turned to you thinking of maybe, just maybe, yourself as being the goal. Once you truly understand this, you set up camp. The sun sets. You build a home, and decorate it with experiences and schemes. You still go for hikes, but look forward to returning to your camp. You don’t explore the world as much as you used to. You found a home, by walking the earth.

Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci, ca 1490

Understand that the artistic process consists of the pursuit of .. itself. It’s a deeply self-reflecting, self-referential system, based on your own sensitivities and creations. This system is then used to process the parts of life that you care about. While you can attach yourself to the beliefs and ideals of others, this will remove your voice from the world – maybe even before it was ever formed. By fostering an atmosphere of benevolence towards experimentation, you can raise your own awareness and sensitivities: about what you want, and who you might be. Without these, you can imitate others, but won’t be able to develop your voice, your ideas, your interpretation of the world. You’d be silenced, and stripped of your power.

Read the previous chapter to understand what quality is, and why it is relevant for artists.

I want to understand “quality”. What is it, and why is it relevant to artists?

One’s personal understanding of quality is required for artists to establish their own work practice. Without it, they cannot understand whether a work is “good” to them, right now – and why it would be finished.

The one thing that unites all artists is their pursuit of establishing and implementing a personal work practice. For this, they need to understand their own quality criteria. Yet what does quality mean, and how does it relate to one’s work?

Quality in Everyday Life

When people discuss the quality of an everyday object, they usually think about the level of craft, as well as the care and attention that went into its creation. They also consider how well it fulfills its purpose: the durability of a battery, the sharpness of a knife’s blade, the stability of a chair. Objects rarely exist in, or emerge from a vacuum; most of them are the continuation of generational developments: consider the wheel, whose origins go back to before the Bronze Age. Quite obviously, humans had a lot of time to establish rather specific understandings of what makes a good wheel, and what doesn’t; that’s quality in everyday life: the sum total of valid expectations towards something whose purpose is clear

Quality in the Arts

Art seems to have always accompanied humans – it might even have preceded our species’ consciousness. Seen this way, it makes sense to think of quality in art as equally (highly) evolved as that of everyday objects. For sure, every art historian will be able to judge how well a piece of art fits the quality criteria established over the last couple dozen millennia!

As we know, this isn’t true anymore. While guilds and art academies originally defined, taught and pursued strict ideas about artistic content and form, contemporary art is defined by a near-total openness in regards to what can be done, and how it can be done. This is a consequence of the changed roles and functions that artists have – from anonymous cave painters to anonymous producers of craft objects (in a world before mass production, everything was a craft object), to ordinary people using technologies to depict the world. The age-old artistic function of documenting the world visually has turned optional. As a result, contemporary artists can’t rely on any of the predefined quality ideals that were developed over centuries. Instead, they can (or rather: they have to) adapt and extend the vastness of previous canons and approaches – or they can ignore them. Doing the latter feels shallow: who would want to work in a field whose history they aren’t curious about? Ultimately though, ignoring the past could be another valid way of being an artist.

Ambiguity and the People

This historic change of the role of art also has implications for the viewers of contemporary art: they might not be able to understand what they’re seeing and experiencing, why it could matter, and how to judge it. Differently to everyday objects, the purpose of an artwork might not be clear to them. Maybe the artwork means to criticize something. Maybe it wants to disturb. Maybe it wants nothing of them at all, yet their viewing expectations demand an aesthetically pleasing dialog that they aren’t getting – so their experience becomes frustrating. If viewers apply their preexisting value judgments, chances are they won’t “get” the artwork: the wide variety of contemporary artistic modes can make it unrealistic for a viewer’s expectations to meet an artist’s ideals. They might be entirely oblivious of the reference system that might give context to what’s in front of them. Outreach programs or basic dialogs can offer missing direction and explanations, but not everyone wants to listen to explanations. Some people expect an artwork to speak for itself, yet are unable to see the complexities that it might contain. In addition, some art simply wants to remain obscure. Another frequent issue is the one of craft expectations: what’s made with obvious care and attention to detail, is often understood to matter more, and to be “better art”. At the same time, some people care about art especially for its power to subvert expectations; these people tend to then be bored by art that repeats what’s already been established – they might thus miss the nuances of change in the art of those people who silently expand the canon.

Quality and the Market

Since an artwork’s qualities can be fleeting and misunderstood, it’s often not used as main metric for judgements. Many artists are acutely aware of a unique role reversal: instead of judging an artwork’s quality to derive its monetary value, some people rather want to know about an artwork’s price, in order to then derive its potential quality: in capitalism, the price of something strongly defines our expectations for it – this holds true for art as well, which can be frustrating: if the artist’s visibility is low, it will usually result in their work’s prices to be low just as well. It can take a lot of effort to experience a low-priced work of art, and see its actual qualities – especially if these qualities don’t meet our expectations about what art should be like.

Someone’s price level, awards, residencies or the number of solo shows are external metrics, and can strongly define the perception of an artist’s value: works are good because their price is high, or because they got awards, or because their creator received awards. Refine a sense of distrust when hearing about a work’s “quality”, especially when used by people in positions of power: professors, jurors, curators, art critics, collectors, fellow artists, gallerists, etc. Apply this distrust even when people discuss your work in positive ways: they might use the idea of quality to hide their actual intent.

Personal Choices

Contemporary artists have a lot of rather personal choices to make. They need to decide which media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content to use, and how to use them.

For each of these, they have to develop personal quality criteria. These can change over time – artists don’t need to stick to previous ones. To the contrary, the pursuit of quality ideals is so heavily ingrained in contemporary thinking of arts, that artists who “simply” follow one and the same recipe for years, are frequently frowned upon: certain people dislike or question the idea of formula-based art processes, although art historically, the application of such processes might be what defined Western art the strongest. Nevertheless, artists need high degrees of curiosity about their interests, and a willingness to express these interests through endless approximations, and often frustrating mistakes: no one can tell them what to do (how their personal choices might look like), yet people will only ever be interested in the consequences of exactly these choices: this is an unusual situation in today’s world.

One’s quality criteria include certain expected decisions of contemporary art: what to do, and how to go about it. They also include process-related decisions that can come unexpected to laypeople, and sometimes aren’t understood as important to the end result: which brushes to use, how to hold, use and clean them; how to mix colors; what palette and which canvas to use, and how to stretch and prime it; whether to work on an easel or the wall, or to paint on a table. While certain art schools offer specific and strict advice on how to pursue one’s artistic practice, their graduates ultimately have to decide on their own how to blend these guidelines into a contemporary art practice: their own artistic practice. If they simply stick to what they were taught, it will likely result in anachronistic works that recreate the spirit of a time that’s essentially past. In open-quality systems like art, you can’t rely on other people’s quality judgements – the likelihood of them pursuing exactly your goals is extremely low. They might be unable to comprehend your ideas, resulting in misguided feedback or advice. That’s why you need to develop and discover your own standards and ideas of excellence: your quality criteria. It can therefore be beneficial to find art schools that discuss meta-levels of art, instead of only giving explicit craft directions: how to think about art, how to pursue one’s curiosities, how to manifest and process. An ideal art school would combine meta with craft specifics.

Read the next chapter to understand how to find or establish quality in your art.