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Seems a little backward, doesn’t it? It’s supposed to be quality not quantity… But that’s the idea behind NaNoWriMo and I think it applies to Polymer Clay or any other creative activity.

Saturday is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 50,000 words in one month. I was reading a book by the founder Chris Baty (No Plot, No Problem) which described the concept.

Basically, the idea is to have a deadline and the support of other people doing the same project and to write so much and so regularly that you get past your Inner Editor which makes you procrastinate and second guess yourself. The idea is to just write without worrying about it, to have some fun and prove that you can accomplish something. And he makes the point that it’s often not any worse than a normal first draft that you spent hours agonizing over every sentence.

I think the same thing can apply to art. I don’t remember whose blog had the anecdote but it talked about an experiment with a ceramics class. One half of the class was told they would be graded on one piece. They had all semester to make that perfect piece and they agonized over it. The other half of the class was told quality didn’t matter. They were going to be graded on how many pieces they produced. So, they started whipping out as many pieces as they could. At the end of the semester, their pieces were better even though they hadn’t put any thought into quality.

And that’s the idea behind NaNoWriMo. Quality comes about after quantity, and relaxing a bit about the importance of it all.

I was reading Kathleen Dustin’s interview in Polymer Cafe yesterday and she made a comment about making art personal.

It made me wonder about my own. Is it personal? Usually I just think of something I want to make - an animal I want to sculpt, what I want it to look like, and then I make it… Is that personal? It doesn’t really sound like it when I put it that way.

But I think it is just the same. I almost always sculpt animals or something from nature. And I know EVERY artist is inspired by nature so while that may be my personal inspiration, it’s not very unique

But I’ve always loved animals. When I was a kid my family had a mini, hobby sort of farm. At one time or another we had ponies, horses, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese… And there were swallows flitting in and out of the eaves in the barn, and deer and pheasants in the fields. I spent alot of time outside, making forts, exploring or just sitting in trees and thinking. I read alot too - one of my favorite books was by Jacques Cousteau and full of fascinating ocean life. The walls of my room didn’t need wallpaper - I had them covered in exotic animals and landscapes pulled from National Geographic.

So is my art personal? Yes, I think so. But I might be able to make it a bit more so by thinking about where it’s coming from. And maybe using some of those childhood memories and sculpting the ones that mean something to me. I’ve already sculpted the swallows… They’re beauty and freedom and effortless flight, and a touch of my childhood.