Quality vs. Quantity

To everything there is a season! November was my season to explore drawing more by participating in NaNoJouMo here. It was fun. Some of the art journal pages that I made on my watercolor moleskine, I really liked and was surprised at how they turned out. A few I was disappointed in, but not one of them was a waste. I tried different things with just about every prompt and some of the pages the fault was more in the way I laid out the page. The energy or the eye wasn’t pleased. I had a choice and sometimes it gelled and sometimes it didn’t.

I want to share a story with you that has influenced my thinking in the regard of creating or doing art. I wish I could remember where I heard this little story, when I do I’ll give them credit. Here goes: There was an Art teacher who divided his class into 2 groups. For the first group he told them, “I will grade you on quantity. Yes, quantity, the more pages you give me the higher your grade will be, irregardless of what you do on the pages”. To the second group he told them, “I will grade you on Quality. The better and prettier your work, the higher your grade will be. I want to see the very best you can do”.

Which group do you think turned out the better work? The Quantity group or The Quality group????

I thought it would be the quality group, why wouldn’t it be? They were taking more time, probably using the better materials and measuring everything out and deciding what looked the best. They worked really hard on every single piece. But I was wrong, the group that produced the better work was the Quantity group! The quantity group? How could this be? Well, apparently they didn’t worry about perfection and making everything so pretty and precise. They played, they colored, they painted, they did a ton of trial and error. You see this group learned. They learned as they went along and they got better and better at the task on hand. I also wonder if maybe their ego wasn’t in the way and they were able to silence their inner critique. They enjoyed different media and didn’t get bored with a piece. They were able to experiment.

So, this is my take on “art”……I want to just make stuff. Lots of stuff. All sizes, using many different techniques. Markers, paint, fabric, canvas, photography, decorating, collage, digital art, get your hands dirty art! I better get going, there’s a lot of stuff out there to make :D :D

How about you? What are your thoughts on creating art????

Thanks for stopping by,

Eden