Open Studio...Open Minds.

I have an Open Studio on a Thursday from 4 - 6pm. For the past five weeks I have had the privilege of two young lads who have taught me a lot about the diverse mindset of creation. They have very different approaches to their own creation and they are both very important.

One boy's approach is very methodical and well thought out. He is a very polite boy who has a very clean approach to art making. He knows what he wants to make and he can apply the necessary thinking to finish his tasks. He can work within the remits of the materials and he uses logic to problem solve, he is very productive because of this approach and his work is neat and concise.

The other boy is very peripheral in his thinking and has a highly experimental approach. He has big ideas and they require a lot of effort and sometimes his ideas link to other ideas during the process. He has a very dynamic mind and if he could enhance his technical ability he would produce some highly original work. His work is lively and he will start playing with his product before its even finished.

Both boys display the mind tools needed to make art. I get a great amount of joy watching them and learning from their energetic methodologies. What I have learnt is if we are too analytical our expectations of ourselves may be too high and we may feel the crippling grip of perfectionism. If we are too divergent, we may struggle to focus to the point our output is inhibited. Our skill development may dwindle if we only focus on ideas and don't push them through to completion. Whatever our preferred way of thinking, we need to review our learning and try to deepen our understanding, this comes through our documentation of the processes we encounter. Our sketchbooks are amazing tools to help us do this. If we are too busy exploring and not documenting what we learn, we may loose important information.

Through exploring materials and making art with each other in the studio, both boys are learning from each other. I know I only have a short while before their needs divert to other things and maybe the sessions will stop, but hopefully the studio experience has meant that each of these essential mindsets of creation, could rub off on each other and they may just have been inspired.