Collaboration
I’m not un-artistic. I’ve got a pretty good eye for colors and a decent sense of taste in fashion and interior decorating (at least, no one recoiled in horror from most of my living spaces, so I’m calling it a victory. small victories. yes). but I don’t have the time or inclination to get good at it. I knew a long time ago that someday I was going to have to find myself a willing artist/victim/collaborator if I wanted to render my wild, colorful ideas.
so along comes this man with whom I fall irreversibly in love. we buy an iPad. he starts sketching. we get married. he starts doing 3-D art and practices at least ten hours a week at drawing, painting, and sculpting digitally.
suddenly…I have my artist.
I’ve made it clear that my dearest has no obligation whatsoever to indulge my silliness and brainstorming kicks, but he seems to love it. he’s been designing me space fighters, bubble cities, ornate weapons, and alien species. almost every day, he asks me what I want to see him draw, or what he can model for me.
some time I’ll write separately about watching his transformation from frustration with a pencil to innate confidence with a stylus. that journey, in and of itself, is going to make for some inspirational material. for now: he’s mine and he’s talented and even if neither of us ever make a dime off our work (too late, for both), we can play in our shared sandbox for the rest of our lives.
<3
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: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 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.