art and fear

i'm reading another "art" book entitled 'Art and Fear' ... really great so far and anyhow, this quote made me laugh out loud:

"Artists don't get to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of NOT working." -Stephen DeStaebler

unfortunately for me and most artists i know, this is an entirely accurate assessment. there is something about the fear and pain of making a work that keeps me from it until i am so creatively backed-up that i need to spill out. i suppose there is a discipline which can somewhat override this tendency, but i often entirely fail to employ it.
however, i am coming to a realization that all the reading and drawing i do is a valid employment of my mind and energies in the efforts to keep thinking about art and keep my imagination very much alive and childlike. i think sometimes i get very caught up in wanting that every piece i make would be a success and communicate the feeling, thought, experience, etc. which motivated it. i labor and labor and panic and freeze in this mode and eventually i produce something. sometimes it is exactly what i meant to say and other times it just "something."

perhaps it is a stroke of greater maturity to realize that growth is a process and that maturation itself comes in seeming waves of intensity... and that growth in the arts means sorting through all the really bad ideas to find the really superb ones.

it is such an odd awareness to be thinking that what i am learning now will seem so common to me in a few months and that my whole life will feel like the slow peeling away of scales from my eyes and mind and heart.... a bittersweet metamorphosis for sure.