You must experiment!
Failure to experiment leads to craft shows and chintzy work.
The whole process of creating art is completely subjective and open to interpretation at all bounds. I want to urge everyone to not be afraid to experiment in their work. Artwork can be created by the numbers, but most viewers will be able to tell it is done in a formulaic way. It won’t stand out amongst the crowd. I recently attended a local arts & craft show and I couldn’t count how many people were selling mostly the same stuff. If it wasn’t rock bracelets, it was plywood cutout figures. They might be good at what they do when making those figures, but they weren’t willing to experiment. All of them looked the same, to the point I was wondering if they weren’t homemade but rather being resold from elsewhere. That means that they were either being made from a pattern or the entire genre has simply become stagnant.
The thing about experimentation is that no one has to know. Photography, for example, is great for experimentation. It is so easy to try something new, especially with digital cameras. Try getting lower, to the point of laying in the grass, and get a shot from a worm’s eye view.
Read the rest of this entry »
