Chapter 3 of potential hindrances to our creative development

**00III: You need to know the rules before you break them**

What would you think if I told you that in order to learn to drive a car, you must first master riding a horse then proficiently drive a horse and buggy, next a Model-T and continue on through the history of transportation? Is there any guarantee that repeating the past will make you a better driver?

In a way, I’ve been talking around this chapter all along. If we firmly believe there are rules to follow first, doesn’t this mean we’ve already agreed to a pre-existing idea of what art is? And, if so, do we expect someone to show us exactly what it is?

We could bring up all sorts of foundations or rules relative to creative pursuits. The idea that we might need to lock in a level of understanding and knowledge about our materials of choice makes sense; it’s easy to see how a foundation-first approach might work out well in cooking, architecture, music (if you want melodies), ceramics (our clay could potentially explode in a kiln) or even painting a watercolour (we need to add water to the paint, right? Or do we?). Then there are the standards of ‘good composition’. Things like:  the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Rule, the S Curve, the Principles & Elements of Art and Design etc.

So how does the belief that we need to know the rules before we break them potentially expand or stand in the way of our free-flowing invention and expression?

Forgive me for having to keep coming back to this distinction between craft(skills) and art. I only frame it this way because of how creativity is commonly approached in academic institutions (otherwise, there is no need to consider a distinction). Therefore, to get to what may be keeping us from the elusive qualities of our creative abilities there is a necessary imposed logic (and I can’t expect everyone to read these posts in order from the start). Let’s just look for a second at the two (incomplete) lists from an earlier post:

When we consider craft (as skills), it’s fairly obvious that this includes a realm of knowledge and wisdom that can be communicated in steps that can be learned through imitation and discipline. It’s a pretty amazing thing that humans have discovered beautiful ways to make and know things and can pass those skills and knowledge on to others. And we’ve already been down the road of some possible limitations of imitation, so we don’t need to rehash that (all of these chapters will tend to overlap).

Now if we are open to consider art as a pretty complex feature of the human experience that cannot be taught, then perhaps more useful questions are: What’s the point of knowing any rules and then breaking them? and Whose rules do we need to know? In my attempt to unfurl these Qs, more are bound to float to the surface and hopefully it will become more apparent that it’s our individual perception and response to said rules that matters.

Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk but no flowers grow.

-VINCENT VAN GOGH