On Vision and Craft
EPISODE 072: ON VISION AND CRAFT
There is a relationship between the skills—or craft—that we hone, and our ability to dream about what is possible and reach beyond it. Creativity is not the realm of technique alone, nor only in the inner life of the imagination, but in the way they work together and call each other forward. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I spent last weekend working out my frustrations on a block of black walnut that deserves way better than the likes of me carving away at it. I was, and still am, trying to make a carved wooden handle for one of my cameras. The alternative is spending $125 on a soulless piece of plastic, and on a whim, having decided that I could do better and had nothing to lose, I grabbed some wood leftover from one of Cynthias' recent project and I started cutting, gluing, clamping, carving, and sanding my way closer and closer to just giving up and ordering the damn piece of plastic.
To say it's not going well is an understatement. I've now gone through a couple of prototypes and have worked out some of the bugs in my design, but limited by my rather basic knowledge of how to safely use what few tools I have, and having never worked with walnut before, there's a clear point at which I'll have taken my vision as far as it can go with the skills that I have. Far from being the beautiful polished handcrafted handle with which I imagined I'd be lugging my camera into the Land Rover on Safari this January, a piece of craftsmanship that would speak to the romance of an earlier day when such things were made by men with plaid shirts and gentle beards, this thing is starting to look like a piece of crap even an 8-year old would would refuse to bring home from shop class to give to his Dad on Father's day.
What's this got to do with you and your creative life? Well, I'm not 100% sure yet, but having been asked recently about the relationship of craft and skill to the less tangible realm of imagination and vision, I thought maybe we could talk about it. I'm David duChemin and this is episode 072 of A Beautiful Anarchy, welcome here.
Music / Intro
While those who know me are probably already looking around at each other as if to say, "wait, he's got power saws, now? Is this really a good idea?" my time in the portion of the garage that I call, aspirationally, "the workshop" are not generating the kind of artisanal projects I imagined they might when I first brought home the orbital sander, and the mitre saw. I go into each of my projects with clear visions of perfectly mitred corners, smooth unblemished cuts, and—eventually—finished pieces Cynthia will look at with pride. Instead I worry that she's giving me fewer and fewer projects to "help" her with. As a bit of a newby to all this, I feel—to put it mildly—unequal to the task.
But I've felt this way before. I know this feeling. You know the way you feel in your gut when you hear that very particular mix of squealing tires, grinding metal, and breaking glass and know instantly that two cars have collided? That's the way I feel in the workshop these days, hearing over the saws and sanders, the unmistakable sound of the collision between an over-developed imagination and an under-developed craft.
I felt this as a younger man learning to draw. I could see things in my mind's eye, and I'd sit down with pencils and a sketchpad and what ended up on that paper wasn't remotely like what I had conjured in my mind. I'd be trying to draw a moose, the image so clear in my imagination, and instead would end up with something that more closely resembled, I don't know, a drunk dog with a swollen nose and a couple of lampshades on its head, the misalignment between my vision and my inability to execute that vision clearly articulated by those who would encouragingly say, "Oh my God, I love it! What is it?"
I felt like this when I first started photography too. And I recognize this dissonance in my students as well as they try to bridge the void that inevitably opens like a chasm between their craft, such as it is right now, and their ever-expanding vision. It is the nature of things that our vision usually outpaces our craft. Being relatively unhindered by things like physics, or the necessity of mastering tools and materials, imagination and vision have fewer real-world constraints or barriers to entry.
And yet they remain related to each other. If you don't know what is possible, it's hard to really imagine what could be in a practical way, or even get serious about being creative with problems you don't know exist in the first place. We've had ongoing renovations in our home since we bought it almost 3 years ago, the latest of which was tearing up the front yard and taking it through what looked like various war-zone recreations, before turning it into something quite beautiful. All the way through these projects the people we were working with would turn to me for guidance. "So what do you want to do here?" they'd ask, and I kept telling them I had only vaguest of ideas, that they were the experts, and without understanding what was possible, it was really hard to speak intelligently about the ideas I had in my head. I mean, I had this vision, it was mapped out in the drawings I had made, but without a deeper knowledge of the craft it would take to make these things real, I found it almost impossible to make choices, without Cynthia throwing me a lifeline in the form of endless Pinterest boards and Instagram feeds which immediately helped me understand what was possible and gave me a direction in which to allow my imagination to run wild.
There is an inescapable relationship between the very real, tangible world of craft and the more speculative world of the imagination. In the late eighties I spent a week at Disney's Epcot Center in Florida and if my memory is at all accurate it was the Spaceship Earth ride in Future World whose narrator kept saying "if you can dream it, you can do it." Or maybe he said it once and I remember it as being on a bit of a loop because I did the ride so many times. "If you can dream it, you can do it." was part of a quote from Walk Disney , the rest of it was this: "always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.”
But it's not quite accurate, is it? It started with a dream and a mouse and at least some ability to draw the mouse, and to do whatever it is that animators do, never mind the ability to tell a compelling story. These are elements of skill and craft, not only imagination. In fact, even that's not quite right. Mickey Mouse started out at Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which Disney only changed because he lost the rights to Universal Studios, but if you do some searching you can find early renderings of both and they're not much different from each other. Of course this is a bit beside the fact but it's never really just as simple as being able to dream it. It also takes the necessary skills to pull it off.
Creativity is a bit like a call and response between what we can dream and what we can do, and it relies on the development of both in order to keep moving forward. The more skilled our craft becomes the more it informs our vision or imagination of what is possible, and the more we dream, the more demands those dreams make on our ability to realize them with the skills of our craft. One feeds the need for the other. And growth in either calls the other forward, if we're listening and chose to follow the call.
In the photography world I often get the feeling that there are two teams. Team Craft focuses on matters of technique. It is uncompromising in its focus on pushing the limits on what is possible with the technology. They have their own vernacular, their own goals, and their own assessment of what makes a final photograph "good". Team Vision, or Creativity, on the other hand is a little more free-spirited. If Team Craft draws heavily from among the nerds and the geeks of this world, both terms I use with equal parts affection and reverence, then Team Creativity draws from among the dreamers and the artists. They are the ones who want to say something, they're more about the art than the artifice.
And the illusion that these two groups are on separate teams—not only in the photography world, but across disciplines—reminds me of a prescient line from singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. In his song Burden of the Angel/Beast he says:
Those who know don't have the words to tell,
And the ones with the words don't know too well.
Our ability to say or express something, through our craft, cannot be separated from the need for the skills of that craft.
The writer with an extraordinary mastery of language but nothing to say is just as hobbled as the one with the wildest imagination and no words or the skill with which to wield them.
The painter with the most astonishing knowledge of pigments and colour theory and capable of brush strokes of extraordinary skill is still merely in possession of unapplied skill and meaningless mastery unless she uses them to say something, to stir something in us that is bigger than mere canvas and paint and years of practice.
No art I can think of, and here we open the door to a debate about art that I'm not really interested or even really able to have, but no art I can think of is a product of skilled craft without imagination or creative vision, anymore than it might be the result of the most astonishing creativity and imagination without the means that skilled craft gives us to realize it. To paraphrase Cockburn, those with something to say need the words to say it, and those with the words need to have something to say."
The reason I think this could be an important conversation is that it provides a paradigm that suggests, at any point in our journey, a way forward. It suggests the necessary next steps, especially when we might be floundering, or languishing outside of Flow, that state in which we otherwise do our best work.
Flow happens most reliably in the tension between our craft or skill and what we're trying to accomplish with it. If you're exceptional with whatever the particular tools of your creative craft, but you aren't doing something challenging with it, there's no tension, and flow requires that challenge, or friction, to keep us interested and growing.
Likewise, if you're working on something big for which you've got a clear and compelling vision and your skills aren't remotely sufficient to pull it off, you'll be met not with flow but anxiety and frustration, though more productively this could be seen as an invitation to learn needed next skills, to lean into the gap between what you have mastered and what you have not, and in that to find the challenge, get back into flow, and move a little closer to realizing your vision.
Which brings us back to the workshop and my piece of crap walnut handle, because we so often look to the thing we are making as if our efforts are only validated when that thing becomes what we hoped it would be, when the gap between what we imagine and how we express that is easily bridged. I'll be honest with you, folks, the camera handle I'm making is not going well. Not if we're judging my efforts on how the damn thing turns out. I feel a little bit like I need to find and apologize to the walnut tree for what I'm doing right now. But I am learning. My second prototype is already much more refined, a result of the things I learned while desecrating the first one and muttering not so quietly to myself out there in the garage. Each new lesson learned is bringing me closer to what, one day, might be called mastery—of both tools and materials—and each step closer to that, giving me greater sensitivity to what is possible, allowing my imagination to move forward into places I wasn't aware existed before this. It could well be that much of the work we make now serves its best function not in becoming what we think we're making, but in teaching us whatever it is we need to know to make the next thing. This is how we grow in both craft and vision.
We will all, one day in the future, look back at some or even much of what we make now, and find diminishing joy in it as our vision and skills grow and evolve. The piece that takes pride of place now, in your studio or your portfolio, you will most likely replace with something more refined, something made with greater imagination and mastery of technique, but you'll only do so because you made that earlier work, and from the lessons learned, got where you are now. You can't leapfrog now in order to get to then, anymore than you can skip the mastery of craft in favour of feeding your imagination, and still possess the means to realize the dreams you conjure in that inner world, or vice versa.
All this might seem so obvious, but there is a tendency among those who find themselves more naturally inclined to one side of this equation than the other to underestimate the importance of the other half of things. Those drawn more to the side of skilled craft, the use of tools, and a desire for mastery of technique find it harder to embrace the need for the less tangible stuff of imagination or vision, while those who spend days lost in their thoughts might find it hard to concede that time working on the particular craft that makes it possible to express those ideas would be time well spent. As with so much in life, there is more wisdom, and in this case more creativity, in both/and than in either/or. It is not whether craft or vision is better than the other, but whether either alone is sufficient to pull us forward, to create what right now is just a little out of reach.
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Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0