Another book that I really, really liked was Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orlandand. Somebody had told me that Robert Rodriguez had recommended it and I love Robert Rodriguez because he wrote a great book called Rebel Without a Crew and kind of changed filmmaking. He’s kind of his own guy who goes out there and does his own thing and he’s really just more of an independent filmmaker which a lot of people don’t like that and I can see both sides of the argument but I think it’s good to know some independent filmmaking traits.
Anyway, so I’d heard that he had recommended this book Art and Fear so I read it and this book is so incredible because it really puts certain areas, like perfectionism, into clearer perspective. Perfectionism is where you are basically held hostage because you can’t do anything until it’s perfect. I had the luxury of growing up in a religion that taught certain things differently and one of the things that my religion taught was that you first produce quantity and then quality.
This is great advice for an artist, or really anyone in any industry. You have to understand that you have to do it first and then you can tweak your product and get better and better. You’ll see that with my modeling. At first I just shot everything and as much as I could and now I’m working on figuring out how to make it better for example, lose a little weight, look this way, hold these positions. So that is what I have worked on and that is better than being paralyzed by perfectionism, which is when someone says “oh my gosh, it has to be perfect before I do anything”.
Art and Fear kind of gets rid of a lot of that. It’s a small book as well, Art and Fear and also The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and Shawn Coyne, are very small books, super easy to read. I definitely recommend reading them, talking about them, writing about them. They are great resources for artists to help you get inspired, and if you aren’t ready to take action as an artist right away, these books will help push you in the right direction and that’s what’s key… getting pushed into doing it and taking baby steps.
For me, right now, my baby steps is the modeling because when I look at myself as a model I go “oh, ok, I get it, this is how other people see me”. I don’t look like a leading lady in my eyes. So what do I need to do to get to be that leading lady and then what kind of leading lady do I look like? You know, establishing what kind of an actress or star am I? The tomboy, which I play a lot and I am in real life or am I the girly-girl? What kind of actress do I look like? The more I dress and model and get my modeling together, the more I feel that I look like a leading lady in my own eyes and I’m just getting closer and closer to that. However, imagine if I had said, “oh no look at these pictures, they’re terrible. I’m not going to do this anymore”. I would’ve never really experienced everything I’ve experienced so far, which has been amazing and I know what I’m going to experience soon is just more amazingness. So anyway, it’s definitely worth getting out there and just doing it. This is how you make discoveries and gain experience because that’s what life is about… the experiences.
Love watching Sun !