Quantity Over Quality In Art (and Life)?

I’ve always been a quantity over quality artist, and what I mean by this is that rather than being intentional about what I’m doing or meticulously planning things, I typically make a lot of garbage and hope for the best. This isn’t a particularly efficient way of working, but I personally find it quite effective. There are three main benefits of half-assing my art process that I would like to point out here:

  1. Jumping straight into making stuff is faster (and most importantly, takes less brain power and motivation) than planning it out first, so I make more stuff.
  2. I finish more stuff, or at least I have more stuff that I’m calling “finished”( no matter how questionable its state of completion may be in reality).
  3. By proxy of spending so much time making and finishing things, my ability to both make and finish things improves over time.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this. If I’m on a tight deadline, I will run with the first (and likely terrible) idea I have and try my best to make it work. It typically yields mixed results, but hey, deadlines are deadlines. And if I have to learn a new thing in order to make the deadline, I try to put the appropriate amount of effort into learning the thing. There’s also some stuff that does require a bare minimum of planning - I find that jumping straight into coding something is, for me at least, an absolute recipe for disaster. But the main exception to this is my music writing process, which is incredibly perfectionistic for no good reason. If I think the music I’m working on is bad, I’m very unlikely to work on it. Unfortunately, this is a vicious cycle - I have no music skills, I don’t work on music, my music skills continue to not exist, the music I do write is terrible, and I never finish music. In the 5 years I’ve been dabbling in writing music, I’ve finished maybe three or four one-to-two-minute pieces, and I think all of them are bad.

Which brings me to my next point: consistently making garbage means that over the years, the overall level of quality of the garbage will get higher and higher. This doesn’t actually stop me from considering it to be garbage; just because my ideas now are, on average, better than my ideas from when I was 15 doesn’t mean I shouldn’t consider ideas that are below average by my current standards to be below average. So this is a little problematic - if I’m making a lot of garbage, the vast majority of what I create will be, well, bad. Which means that at any given point in time, I am likely convinced that I am completely inept at at least one of the things I’m pursuing.

With the exception of my failure to write music, I feel like I’ve applied the “make garbage” philosophy to almost every creative pursuit I’ve taken up. It’s very much a “do a lot now, criticize later approach”: great for getting your feet wet, and even better for provoking a crisis once you’ve jumped into the deep end. You pick up the basics through trial and error, and then, now what? Do you shift your focus slightly and make a different kind of garbage? Do you make higher effort garbage? Do you try to be more intentional and make stuff that isn’t garbage? Do you give up? And most importantly, how do you decide to feel about all the garbage you’ve made so far?

I’ve applied this philosophy to a lot of different things: drawing, painting, photography, sound editing, possibly even writing. And the problem with making “garbage” is that the art you’re making isn’t something you’ll only consider to be bad in retrospect. No, you consider it to be bad now, and whenever you do stumble upon something that is good, you consider it a fluke. Never mind that the entire point is writing 2 pages of terrible ideas in hopes of coming up with a single good one; never mind that the whole point of filling a sketchbook in a month is to get better at drawing through repetition. In grade nine, I filled around 2 and a half sketchbooks in the semester I was taking the art class; one of my friends in visual arts filled roughly half. My sketchbooks were messy and filled with drawings that neither were nor were trying to be good; hers was a work of art.

Whenever you hear artists talk about how to get better, there’s a lot of stuff they bring up. Knowing fundamentals; deliberate practice; mileage; and so on. I feel like I’ve always had the mileage part down; after all, getting mileage is my entire M.O. The problem, I find, is that when it comes to everything else, I a) am lacking, and b) can’t bring myself to do anything about the fact that I’m lacking.

I think it might be a discipline issue. Unlike the average successful artist (that I’m aware of, anyway), I am not a particularly disciplined person. I have trouble sticking to the goals I make; I have trouble doing the things I tell myself I’ll do; I spend wayyyy too long thinking about things rather than actually doing them; and I think I have trouble motivating myself to do simple but foundational tasks. I am mediocre at drawing because I never had the patience to sit down and put myself through the fundamentals, step by step. Making stuff really fast is fun and immediately gratifying. Studying perspective and doing value studies is not.

While formal training might be one of the least efficient ways to level up your art skills, I think it works particularly well for people with my leanings and philosophy. I am happy to produce a very large volume of work in a short amount of time and get mileage, but I’m probably not going to direct myself to work on fundamentals unless I have to. But that’s what courses are for; they provide structure where I would struggle to create it myself.

I guess my real issue is that I can’t be a student forever. I can’t afford it; also, I think I’d get sick and frustrated of it quite quickly. Art suddenly becoming “academic work” and getting grades assigned to it is one of my least favourite experiences, and I think whenever I deal with that charade for too long it messes with my relationship with my art. But even more than practical reasons why I can’t be a student forever, I don’t think anyone should be a student forever. School is a crutch, and I think at some point every artist has to forge their own path that’s in line with their own vision, and I worry sometimes that I won’t have the right tools to do so when the time comes. I can generate lots of ideas, but can I pull off and execute a reasonably complex and involved idea? Do I have the discipline to build new skills I might need? Am I capable of striving for excellence without other people telling me how and when to do it?

You know, I think this blog post went sideways. I don’t think I’m only writing about art anymore. These might just be worries I have in general.