To Make Good Art: Quantity or Quality???

Is quantity more important than quality? Here’s my answer.  I think that quality IS quantity.  I think that quantity is required to make anything good.  My friend is a musician, and she had a chance to work with a very well-known producer to record her album.  The producer asked her to have 100 songs ready… for a 10-song album.  There’s a story about a college ceramics class where the professor split the class into one group that would be graded on one, perfect pot, and the other group who would be graded on the sheer number of pots they were able to make.  The group who made the most pots, also made the best pots. 

As an artist, I think making a lot of art is the only way to develop a unique voice. 

The way it works out in my studio practice is to find a concept or technique that is exciting to me, and then I iterate. I make multiple pieces using the same colors or style. I really enjoy this process. Some artists say that they fear they will become bored if they have to discipline themselves to focus on one expression, but I find that the opposite is true. I find worlds within worlds. When I focus on one tiny idea, I find new and interesting adaptations emerge.

A perfect example is the work I’ve been doing with acrylic. At first, I was using a palette knife to create thick bands of gradient paint. I made a lot of those. Then I realized I could drag a tool through wet paint and make a really cool pattern. I made very large “chunky” paintings and small ones. I made different patterns with the needle tool on the wet paint. I definitely made more than 500 of those paintings.

I mixed glitter and mica into the medium to create different colors.

I was super interested by the sculptural nature of the paint, by the sensory pleasure of the buttery paint and the gradients. So, I started using other tools. It was a natural progression. The Dragon Petals were born. I used a small palette knife to create “scales” of paint. I was still using a lot of medium and gradient colors, but a different textural surface was created.

Then, lately, I have discovered that if I don’t fully blend the paint into the medium, it creates a beautiful streaked appearance. I’m currently obsessed with this new idea.

Now, I can’t say if my thick paintings are 100% original to ME. There are a lot of people who have been painting abstractly with thick paint for more than 50 years and no doubt someone somewhere has done something similar. I also can’t say whether my work is “good”. Who knows? I can say I am extremely satisfied and fulfilled by the process! I can say that I am in a continual state of discovery, and I’m turning over every stone I find. I’m giving my creative ideas the honor of expression. What will come of it, I can’t say.

One thing is true, I’ve sold a lot of the work in the process. In fact, if I wasn’t selling it, I definitely wouldn’t be making the volume I’ve been making.