Creativity Quote by Henry Ossawa Tanner

An artist’s ultimatum disguised as a shrug: push the work forward, or let it fail honestly, but don’t sand it down into something merely acceptable. Tanner’s line reads like studio advice, yet it’s also a refusal of the polite middle that art institutions often reward. “Get it” is blunt, almost impatient; it treats clarity of intention as the first duty. Then comes the dare: “better or… worse.” He’s not celebrating incompetence so much as insisting that risk is the only route to discovery. A painting that becomes “worse” in the process may be moving toward a truer solution; a painting that stays safe is already dead.

The subtext sharpens when you place Tanner in his moment. As a Black American artist who built his career amid the racial constraints of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and ultimately found greater freedom working in Europe), he knew compromise wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. Respectability politics, patron expectations, and the pressure to be “representative” all tug artists toward a careful, digestible version of themselves. “No middle ground” reads like a stance against that flattening. It’s a demand for agency: if the work is going to be judged, let it be judged on a real attempt, not a negotiated one.

What makes the line work is its hard-edged pragmatism. Tanner doesn’t romanticize struggle; he draws a boundary. The only unforgivable outcome is the one that avoids stakes.