This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially--statistically speaking--there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius.
---from the Introduction

Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. The book's co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is expeienced by artmakers themselves.

This is not your typical self-help book. This is a book written by artists, for artists --- it's about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic. Word-of-mouth response alone--now enhanced by internet posting--has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.

Art & Fear has attracted a remarkably diverse audience, ranging from beginning to accomplished artists in every medium, and including an exceptional concentration among students and teachers. The original Capra Press edition of Art & Fear sold 80,000 copies.

An excerpt:

Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently. On so many different fronts. For so little external reward. Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues. You have to find your work...

In the perennial best-seller Art & Fear, Ted Orland (with David Bayles) examined the obstacles that artists encounter each time they enter their studio and stand before a new blank canvas. Now, in The View From The Studio Door, Orland turns his attention to broader issues that stand to either side of that artistic moment of truth.

In a text marked by grace, brevity and humor, Orland argues that when it comes to art making, theory and practice are always intertwined. There are timeless philosophical questions (How do we make sense of the world?) that address the very nature of art making, as well as gritty real-world questions (Is there art after graduation?) that artists encounter the moment they're off the starting blocks and producing work on a regular basis.

Simply put, this is a book of practical philosophy. As a teacher and working artist himself, Orland brings authentic insight and encouragement to all those who face the challenge of making art in an uncertain world. The breadth of material covered is reflected in chapters that include Making Sense of the World, Art & Society, The Education of the Artist, Surviving Graduation, Making Art That Matters, The Artistic Community, and more.

The View From The Studio Door is the perfect companion piece to Art & Fear, and will appeal to a similar (and already-established) audience of students, working artists, teachers and professionals. For students' benefit, The View is also modestly priced, with wide page margins for easy note-taking and annotation.

For me, photography is more like poetry than prose: scraps of information are there, which the individual viewer can piece together into some kind of narrative. --Martha Casanave

Trajectories: A Half-Century of Portraits is a collection of portraits by Martha Casanave that span from her childhood to her present-day work. Rooted in the desire to create narrative, Casanave's portraits evoke questions and leave space for more than one story to be imagined around her subjects. Casanave's portraits are marked by her careful attention to her subjects' environments. Some of the portraits in the book are of people she has photographed once, others many times over a span of years. Her work with immigrants, artists, strangers, and longtime friends acts as a mirror that reflects and illuminates the connection between our surroundings and ourselves--our cultures, our histories, and our own trajectories.

Martha Casanave, born 1946, graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1969, where she studied Russian language and literature, and Japanese. She began her working life as a translator in Washington, DC. She later changed careers, choosing photography, which she had engaged in since childhood. Casanave's photographs are included in many major collections, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stanford Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the New Mexico History Museum, the Polaroid Collection, the Russian Union of Art Photographers (Moscow), and the Russian Museum of Photographic History (St. Petersburg).

In his best-selling Art and Fear, David Bayles (with Ted Orland) closely examined personal and autobiographical episodes in search of general truths about artmaking. Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West.

When European Americans discovered the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day.

Bayles writes: . . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no one really wanted to, when there was every chance to get it right, when voices of caution were constantly raised, when what needed to be done was frequently obvious, and when, occasionally, we did get it right (think: National Parks).

Notes on a Shared Landscape engages the issues that make the West the West--widely ranging over the autobiographical and the cultural, the ecological and the epistemological, the cow and the potato. This is an intensely personal book, and though the Western library is huge, there is not another book like it. Much of the text unfolds in Yellowstone, where Bayles writes:

In the Lamar valley of the Yellowstone, beaver gnaw the trunks of cottonwoods, elk browse their leaves. The shadows are long, even in summer. Even so, it is just another place. In it, just as elsewhere, we see the marks of our own hands faintly because we don't have to know very much about the land we live in, because we are equally a part of and apart from nature, and because there is hardly any moment when humans are more delusional than when self recognition is required.