Jokingly I would tell people who liked my photographs that I was not so excellent at taking pictures as they suspected: after all, I only ever showed them the good pictures.
But then it wasn’t exactly a joke, either.
See, I think there is a difference between expertise and amateurism, and explaining it is tangled up in my own creative efforts. I am an amateur artist, an amateur photographer, an amateur musician. And I am confident in claiming so because the difference between amateur and expert work isn’t always the output, but rather the effort required to be consistently good at the form.
I can make good stuff. But I am admittedly inconsistent.
In photography I called it my one-in-ten rule: if I took ten pictures, one of them was generally pretty good. Again, I could make good stuff, just inconsistently.
Inconsistency has a way of nipping you in the backside when you take on a gig to photograph an event, or are asked to sketch with an audience, or need to stand on a stage and play an instrument. Noodling in your basement and occasionally having a terrific night is fundamentally different from performing on demand. One is the realm of amateurs with wisps of talent, the other is the domain of experts.
And really. I don’t mind being the diamond in the rough, but admitting there is often much more rough than diamond is also about admitting that you can do these crafts for merely the enjoyment of them, too, and that’s not a joke at all.
Terms FROm this POSt
- amateur
- How does one know when one is no longer an amateur? Strictly speaking, once one is paid for work, sure, they can use the label professional to differentiate themselves along that axis of skill. But on another axis, the beginner through expert and elite levels, there is a big swath of territory where someone can have many and probably enough skills to be adequately proficient at a thing while still having a multitude of learnings to overcome.
- audience
- Creativity is often a dance between creator and audience. Art can exist in a vacuum, of course, but the perception of art by a receptive human mind seems to me to a critical half of the creative equation.
- crafts
- I use this term to speak of the arts in a general way. I am not speaking of it in the “arts and crafts” style of the word, but rather in the craftsmanship vibe, in that someone who makes and builds and creates participates in the act of crafting and creating.
- noodling
- In many fields of art or music this is a term to describe loose creativity not intended for sharing or performance. I might noodle on a keyboard typing out character profiles or unpublishable notes. I might noodle on my violin, playing little songs, scales and melodies. I might noodle with an art book, sketching shapes or matching colours.
