Art & Fear

 

I am at a stage in my life where I am overwhelmed and over-inspired. I have all these ideas floating around; bumping and slowly crowding the other. I realised today, that I just have to pick one to start and keep going; there's really no other way around it. There's an excellent parable from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles, that I came across in an interview I read recently and I had to share:

 

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”. 

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.