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©2020 Daniel Sroka.
topic > art and fear
Rust
Whenever you haven’t made art in a while — whether its been a few days or a few months — you get rusty. Starting again is always a slow and sputtering process. I can almost feel a coarse red grit slowing my creativity down to a crawl, hampering my ability to create. And with that grit often comes the same familiar doubts. But I have learned through experience that this “creative rust” is not a problem, but a necessary part of the artistic process.
Success
Just as failure shouldn’t be feared, success shouldn’t be placed on a pedestal. Success is neither impossible nor assured. It is just another part of the creative process, that ongoing cycle of failure to success to failure to success (with tons of hard work in… read more
Failure
We are all so afraid to fail, or even afraid to admit it when we do. But failure is a normal part of life, especially the life of an artist. We are tightrope walkers, attempting to do a profession that is odd, ridiculous, and against… read more
learn the craft of selling your art
The incomparable Ze Frank just put up a video talking about living the creative life. A lot of the “secret” behind living a creative life is in actually, well, living a creative life. Like incomparable Ze Frank says, if you want to be a writer,… read more
my job is absurd
My job is absurd. When I stop to think about it, what I do for a living is simply, utterly absurd. Today I spent hours staring at the seed from a maple tree. Not the whole seed, mind you, but a fragment of that seed…. read more
a little help from your friends
Sometimes you need the help of friends and peers to see the potential in your own art. I had spent yesterday photographing some flowers we picked up at the farmers market last weekend. But after several hours of work, I was growing frustrated. Nothing was… read more
the leaf hunt
As autumn gives way to winter, my ketubah business tends to slow down, and I find more time to spend working in the studio. Autumn is a important time for me: to collect things to photograph, to search for new ideas and inspiration. My son… read more
Fear, creativity, and the stock market
While continuing our conversation on creativity and fear continues over on this post, I realized that the recent insanity in the stock market gives us as artists a good lesson on the nature of fear. (“What?,” you say, “artists learning from.. the stock market?” Yes,… read more
Conversation on creativity and fear
Two years ago I wrote about the relationship between creativity and fear. This past weekend, the conversation got reignited by a couple new visitors to my blog, and we’ve been having an interesting discussion about it. Check it out and join in!
Rewriting my artist’s statement
I find that one of the biggest challenges I face as an artist is writing my artist’s statement. Putting your vision and artistic ideas into words is a nearly impossible task. I mean, one of the reasons I became an artist was to try to… read more