I once read of an artist whose work appeared  frequently in The New Yorker magazine. The magazine received a letter from a subscriber saying that while his cartoons were sometimes amusing, his artistic talent left a lot to be desired. "In fact," the letter went on to say, "my eight-year-old daughter can draw better than you."
The artist wrote back, "Yes, she probably can draw better than me. But I've lived more than her."

Random Notes On Art, Creativity and Self-Love From My Journals

Resides there, at the edge of the human enclosure, artists whose purpose it is to explore the  border territory, what it means to be human. They work where one reality encounters another, where light encounters dark, where scariness and beauty mingle, where demons and gods dance. There, vague sensations are encountered that can often only be sensed on some kind of preverbal basis. They explore their interior world, they explore the mystery of existence, of nature. They do what they do based on some combination of imagination, hard work and discipline. They search for truth and find part-truth. Many of those in this group are not particularly nice, not particularly respectable. To do what they do, it helps to not be overly concerned about what others think.

      Interesting people reside where things get a little risky. Where people, including artists, fail. Where people create big, unique lives. On the African Plains, the Serengeti, at the edges of the herd, where the unpredictable happens, you find the fat zebras with big scars on their backs. That's where the grass is green.

      That's where life is interesting, dangerous, and exciting. In the middle of the herd, where the grass is half eaten and trampled, you find the skinny zebras, the nervous zebras.

      The ones who hope tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

I used to travel around North America asking artists about their lives. I asked them what most occupies their imagination, what fascinates and perplexes them most about life. I asked them about inspiration and discipline, about rejection and persistence. I wanted to know about their spirit spark -- their dream world, their spirituality or meditation practice. I wanted to know where their work comes from -- what they do to relax, to find a core of peace -- a basis from which to create. I wanted to know what they strive to accomplish with their art.

            Nothing I do is made to please. Or shock. It comes from inside. When I walk through an art museum, I look to see what is art and what is kitsch. What is calculated to please, to sell? Lots of modern art seems to me to have been designed. Like designer shoes. What the hell is a designer shoe? It may be valid as a thought, valid as intelligence, but it is not art. Art arises from the deepest recesses of one's being. It might be absolutely unacceptable. Van Gough was unacceptable. He sold one painting in his life and that for twenty-five gilders. But if you look at a piece by Van Gough, you know it is authentic. It came from his core. If I listen to Mr. Bach, I never doubt where it came from. It is not Mr. Bach who is creative, it is something mysterious. It is not intuition because even intuition can be put into words.
- From the Heron Dance interview of Frederick Franck, artist and author of twenty-eight books including Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing.

             Art is not a luxury! Art arises from one's depths or it is not art but kitsch! Art, for me, is and was my digging tool for Meaning, for Truth...my own truth that may speak to your truth. Art then becomes a "religious", a spiritual act, not in any sectarian sense but as a witness to a "religious" attitude to sheer being, to existence as such, being Supremely Meaningful.

-       Frederick Franck, from the booklet Pacem In Terris, describing his peace gardens: "a sacred place that speaks to the sacred space at the core of the human heart."

      Creative people are above all else people of ideas because all art is the expression of an idea. Creativity is a tasting of the water of our own essence. To create something new, you need to live a rich, vast life under your work. I believe art is about love – the sharing of deep emotions like love of life, love of the mystery, love of beauty. Perhaps most difficult of all, art and creativity flow, in part, out of love of oneself.

      All of Picasso’s great paintings came after he gave up drawing well or painting realistically, and instead focused on his dream world and the emotions that came bubbling up. He offered us a portal into symbols of mysterious aspects of life. What Picasso had in abundant quantity, and what most of us lack, is a deep abiding belief that he had something to say that was important. We all have light and dark inside us; Picasso believed that even the darkest nooks and crannies of his inner world were beautiful, were worth exploring, had something important to reveal about the nature of existence.
     Picasso’s paintings are great, in part, because he loved himself, he didn’t give up on himself. He was in love with his vision. He did 50,000 paintings in his life, I think. Not all great of course. But his greatest paintings changed art.

Nobody wanted Walt Whitman, but Walt Whitman wanted himself, and it is well for us that he did.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Our role as artists is communicate from our depths about where the juice hangs out.

  Whatever you give your heart to will challenge the depths of your being, will transform your life, will enrich and deepen your experience of life. To give your heart to your creativity is to pick up a shovel and begin digging inside yourself for what you have to offer the world. You dig to find the beauty inside you. That beauty tends to be difficult to find. It is a journey that is difficult to stay with. But out of these things comes meaning, and meaning is all-transcendent.

       A prerequisite for that life is sacrifice, discipline, hard work. In the end, those things are much more important than talent. If you give your life to it, or a substantial portion of your life to it, it will give itself to you. If you do it half-hearted, it will turn its back on you.

Maybe that is like saying loving yourself is very difficult. First you have to believe that you are worthy of your love. You have to believe that there is a beauty inside yourself. You have to have the courage to offer that to the world. In the beginning at least, the world is likely to be indifferent.

            Everything that is worthwhile, has a price, and for an artist part of the price is dealing with indifference and rejection. Often the indifference comes from oneself. I’ve given up on my art more than once in my life. But ultimately, I made the commitment. I put hours a day into it for years. And for years, I did nothing that was worthwhile. Nothing.

I once heard something on the radio that has stuck with me. Terry Gross was interviewing movie director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, etc) on Fresh Air. Schrader said, in part: 

The secret of the creative life is often to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We are paid to take risks, to look silly. Some people like racing car drivers are paid to take risks in a more concrete way. We are paid to take risks in an emotional way.
      The film critic is like a medical examiner. He gets the cadaver on the table, he opens it up, and tries to figure out why it died. The filmmaker is like the pregnant mother who is simply trying nurture this thing. You have to keep the medical examiner out of the delivery room because he will get in there and he will kill that baby.

It is what is left over when everything explainable has been explained that makes a story worth writing and reading. The writer's gaze has to extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm of mystery which is the concern of prophets....If a writer believes that the life of a man is and will remain essentially mysterious, what he sees on the surface, or what he understands, will be of interest to him only as it leads him into the experience of mystery itself.
- Flannery O'Connor, Literary Witch, Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1962)

In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson