Back on 1 August I mentioned the current project in our local gallery, Unit 9, which will consist of accounts, by members of the group, of how they went about creating a piece of art. The show will rotate items over a couple of months, but yesterday it was hung, displaying the work of four of our sixteen members (including me). It has turned out to be an interesting idea, and the four works making up the opening group really are tackled in different ways. One member seems to distill her work from a large number of fairly spontaneous sketches, by a process of abstraction. Another (who works in textile collages) appears to have started with a collection of fabrics, which have then been matched to a watercolour sketch. This has ended up as a kind of screen. My own project was the memorial windows, that went through a commissioning process, design, critical response, and development, and the accepted design was then handed over to a craftsman to make the windows.
All of these are distinct variants of the creative process. None is the “right” answer to the question of how to go about bit. All end up with a successful pice of work. Interesting.