"Practice makes perfect" comes to mind, we work the wood as a carpenter finding shape and form, music is practiced finding notes leading to new direction.

Enjoying what we do committing to present the very best, all the time growing in knowledge of self, extending a part of who we are through creativity!

Lovely way of looking at life and growth, wishing you a wonderful day filled with accomplishment and joy.

Very true, keep knocking things out.

For the most part, I focus on creativity as the expression of a body of work, as opposed to individual masterpieces. Most of what I write tends to be along the article/personal essay format, and whereas some are really good... I'm more interested in the whole, and in being consistently good, rather than rarely brilliant.

When it comes to my art/painting... pretty much follows the same path. I never set out to create "masterpieces," they occasionally happen by surprise and accident, but I am not ever counting on them.

Prolific comment intended.... coming in good time.

Perfection is the enemy of progress! The hardest part of creating is simply getting started. Glad you're consciously working on it.

@d-pend,

Admittedly, I too approach art with a "masterpiece mentality." That said, I found your arguments thought-provoking and well-articulated.

Here's what I would offer as rejoinder.

When I write a poem or a piece of satire, I'm attempting to "change something" and that "something" is the minds of my readers. My "art" has a functional purpose. If that desired change does not occur, I've failed as a poet or satirist.

Most superficially, that change is a change in their emotional states. If people are not "moved," to tears or to laughter, then I have not affected them by a magnitude that will matter. More profoundly, that change in emotional state acts as a carrier wave for an idea, ideal or insight and it is THAT which is the point of the exercise ... for if I can change your mind, then I can change the world. (Hopefully for the better.)

Using your analogies, a carpenter uses his skills to build a table. But his satisfaction as a craftsman comes not from its eventual completion, but rather from the fact of what it facilitates: That a family, and their friends, will now spend countless hours in communion around it. That it will act as a pretext for creating something larger than itself: The establishment and maintenance of deep emotional bonds. By similar logic, the farmer's fulfillment comes not from filling a burlap bag full of wheat, but rather from its emptying in the making of bread ... that will be eaten on the carpenter's table. And the programmer, he writes code not for its own sake but rather to enable you and I, despite our being a world apart, to share insights about why we create art.

The difference in effect between the "ordinary" and the "extraordinary" cannot be overstated for, most fundamentally, our brains are designed to separate the former from the latter. That is, to reduce the former to the "Ground" while elevating the latter to the "Figure" ... the famous Figure-Ground Relationship, the most elemental aspect of all visual arts. The canvas is always the minds of our audience, but it's a canvas that comes with a host of rules and regulations.

Only a tiny fraction of the stimuli with which we are constantly bombarded will ever be focused upon. The other 99% will be utterly ignored. It will come and go as if it never existed. What's the point of creating a table around which no one will ever sit?

There's an old expression that perhaps makes the point: People don't buy a 1/4 inch drill because they want a 1/4 inch drill. They buy a 1/4 inch drill ... because they want a 1/4 inch hole. Although art is frequently derided as having no utilitarian purpose, such derision is predicated upon considering it only for its own sake. If one is willing to consider downstream effects, Great Art (that which is extraordinary) has shaped, and will continue to shape, humanity in ways too many to enumerate and in ways too profound to articulate.

Perhaps all this sounds too grandiose. After all, poetry is just the rhyming of words. Who cares?

For more than a century, psychologists have been arguing about what hypnosis is. There's currently about a half-dozen theories. Despite no one agreeing about "what it is," everyone agrees about "how to do it:" ABS.

A - Absorb attention.
B - Bypass the Critical Factor
S - Suggestion

Absorb Attention - "Pattern recognition" triggers the secretion of dopamine. The patterns of poetry: Meter, Rhythm, Rhyme and Alliteration hence cause one's brain to be saturated with dopamine. Dopamine is responsible for: Creating focus; holding attention; the formation of long-term memory; and the sensation of "Wanting."

Bypass the Critical Factor - There are many ways to bypass (or limit) critical appraisal of incoming stimuli. Fatigue; Confusion (such as "pattern-breaks." Poetry is a huge pattern-break from prose, the normal and expected form of language communication); Stimuli over-saturation and the grand-daddy of them all, alcohol (Super Bowl ads cost so much not just because they concentrate so many eyeballs, but because so many of those eyeballs are three sheets to the wind).

Suggestion - The direct or indirect communication of an idea, ideal or insight (the most powerful of which is an insight). Ideas, ideals and insights are the basis of our beliefs, and hence, our behaviors.

Great art ... a masterpiece ... is powerful mojo in the minds of men. The fact that this is so seldomly recognized is a testament to the power of subtlety. Alas, such unrecognized (and uncompensated) potency has historically resulted in the "starvation of poets" ... a reality against which I rail and am determined to change (or more likely ... die trying).

Quill

I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum. Not to say that I must produce masterpieces, but that I must produce something special to me in some way. Both approaches are valid (prolific and special). To me, poetry is created whenever the product of an expression is unique and meaningful to the artist and/or their consumer. If it does not mean something special to me and I don't think it will mean something special to anybody else, I won't post it. This is not me being vane, pretentious or elitist. I'm just being true to myself.

On the other hand, I don't consider prolific writers to be unpoetic simply because they post a lot. I am someone who happens to believe that art is also created in the perception and interpretation of poetry. You get from art what you bring to it. Therefore, whether or not a bad prolific writer publishes meaningful work for themselves, I recognize the potential for meaningful interpretation to occur, and when it does, poetry is created.

There is also something to be said about striving for perfection, in terms of honing one's skill. Just as high output sharpens the axe, so to speak, so does focused and deliberate output. By putting effort in to get the words right and get the right words, you end up being able to write the right words and write the words right the first time (ok, I was just messing around there, but you get what I mean).

Ultimately, I find the process of writing my poetry to be exhaustive and time consuming, but I find the same phenomenon in almost all matters of self expression. There is room in this world for both of us and we need each other as I believe that we will all become prolific masters in time.

I believe you & I have had this conversation before.

I believe that straining for feeling is a sin & falsifies art.

For years, decades, I lived by this purist ideal —- rather silence, than work that is sub par...

Now, I’ve come to think of blogging as not really writing, but a clearing of one’s throat, mental/emotional doodling to pave way for true art.

But, I realize we have different temperaments & I respect your prolific production as a sign of intellectual & spiritual vitality 🙏🏼🙏🏼

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

—-Randall Jarrell

The more aggressive and continuous creative approach is one I recently realized will help my art career a lot. I'm more of a perfectionist myself and I want to figure everything out before taking the first step. I have learnt miss that the other way works better, or at least finding a mid point between both.

This post reminds me of the many discussion during the 100 days poetry challenge :)

As for my humble opinion about the matter, I used to try to write masterpieces, meaning I give it much more time, and keep editing and improving, one single poem for months. But the, when I changed that mindset (mostly thanks to you), I've wrote, as daily poems or as "expressions of my instant feelings" afterwards, poems that came more spontaneous, but ones I now like more than my earlier attempts to masterpieces. So I guess we keep practicing and learning and producing, and we don't know when one of the productions ends up being of high quality (to some, even if not to us)

Hi @d-pend, I really appreciated this piece of yours.

I, too, am 'guilty' of that artistic paralysis. Hence, I found that this one line profoundly hit home:

the heart of being creative lies in making the act of creating a devotional habit

And to me, that truly honours the act of creating as creating not merely as an utilitarian pursuit of some preconceived end. To have masterpieces as the end result is one thing. But to create just for the sake of creating the next masterpiece - and being overly fixated on that goal - is quite another.

Thank you once again for sharing these gems; they may not seem to be masterpieces in the conventional sense of the word, but you'll be surprised at the wide-reaching impact your words can have (and in my estimation, already have).

Cheers and resteemed! (: