DAY FIFTY FOUR
Do your creative and making efforts have to be wholly original?
One of my most cherished mementos is a painting of a labrador made by my youngest son when he was about eight years old from a paint by numbers kit. He was very into them at the time. I also have a collection of Airfix models my children made. I can remember my nieces making embroidered samplers from kits. There are 'starter kits' of various kinds in my local hobbyist shop, many of them seemingly involving balsa wood. My mother loves doing jigsaws, which is a form of kit, I suppose. I had a cousin who was a model train enthusiast and built whole towns with stations and sidings and heaven knows what else, all of it from kits. None of these activities seem in any way reprehensible.
Yet today I chose not to post a picture of a batch of marmalade I made yesterday, not because to my mind it doesn't really fall under the definition of making and creativity I have in mind for this blog, but because I made it from a kit. Essentially all I did was add sugar and water to a tin of orange puree. Not very creative or original at all. Not even a full step up from shop bought marmalade; at best half a step.
A year or two back there was a vogue for 'mindfulness' colouring books. Did they call upon a person's creativity? I don't know. There was scope for it, and for individual expression, unlike paint by numbers the choice of what the 'artist' did with the provided pattern was open ended. No doubt some people, perhaps those with some understanding of colour or balance or harmony, produced more aesthetically pleasing work than others. But would any of them be passed off or considered art, or creative? What if a known artist completed one of those books and hung it in a gallery? By some definitions that would classify the work as art.*
Children's efforts are one thing, but when it comes to adults I lean towards the idea that the work should have originated with them, it should be of their own design. There are exceptions, knitting and crochet being obvious ones where it seems to me the level of study required to dessign a useful piece of work is of such an order that it is too much to expect people to do that when they just want to make a jumper. But then I think about tailoring or dressmaking and the same point applies. Perhaps in making these exceptions I am merely showing my ignorance about the difficulty of designing or originating work in other mediums.
I can imagine a situation where you have a fantastic designer who doesn't have the skill to make something, and a skilled maker who doesn't have the imagination to be a good designer. In this situation the two sets of skills are a complement to each other and I don't think anyone should or would fault either person for doing what they are best at. The end result would be something better than either person could produce alone and we should all be happy about that - or so my head tells me. My heart still tugs me towards the designer/maker although it is perfectly possible to recognise the skill involved in each separate process.
I'm going to have to ponder this some more. In the meantime I'm off for some toast and marmalade.
Onwards...savouringly.
*This whole paragraph assumes people actually coloured in any of these books rather than buying them to be recycled at a charity shop some months later.
Picture credit: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Orange -- 2022 -- 9715” / CC BY-SA 4.0
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