Does planning curb creativity in art?

 

An Art Tutor members asked if art can succeed without planning when relying only on creativity. Can one produce great art without organization, taking conscious action steps, big and small, with consistency?    

Many agree that great compositions, which are at the source of most great paintings, don’t just happen by accident. They take planning, patience, and a knowledge of all the visual elements at your disposal. The great thing is, no matter how much or how little talent you have, you’ll always be able to improve your art by sketching out a good composition before you begin.  

Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities. Planning and evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and bad, useful and useless.

Most people evaluate too soon and too often, and therefore create less. In order to create more and better ideas, you must separate creation from planning, coming up with lots of ideas first, then judging their worth later.

This a big problem in any field where there are lots of gurus who tell you their secrets of success. It’s wise to listen, but unwise to follow without question.

Some of the most successful people in the world did what others told them would never work. They knew something about their own idea that even the gurus didn’t know.

Every path to success is different. Therefore, although planning is always encouraged, I suspect that some artists have great instincts for composition, so they spend very little time planning and use their creativity to provide the other half of the equation in order to produce beautiful art.

However, I have seen many painting where is was apparent that no planning occurred and the painting did not keep the eye or focus within the painting or lacked a centre of interest to attract the viewer.

Since planning is always recommended it is also important to recognize that there are different levels of planning and that some level of planning increases the changes of an artist’s success

Whatever approach you favor, paintings are about communications. Like all types of communications, some planning is required if the message is to be received as intended.

Creativity and planning are not at odds; they both complement each other well. So to answer the question, I do not believe that planning curbs creativity in art. What do you think? You can leave comments below.

Today's artist find is Steven Hileman:

I like the colour harmony in this painting.

Have a great weekend.
Danielle