Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

“In case she can’t get what’s in her head and her heart onto the canvas. Maybe she’s afraid of being afraid. That she’ll be so paralyzed by fear she won’t do a thing, she’ll just stand there with her paintbrush, feeling like a fraud.”

One of her cartoons features a white ghost with the caption: “Let yourself be seen.” Below it, Stephanie wrote, “I was nervous about putting my work out in the open. Because as much as I wanted people to know what I was doing, I was worried about being exposed. There was a risk of letting myself be seen. Like if they looked too closely, they’d disc