Too little
Familiar answers only
I already know the sort of pattern I like.
Habit closes the inquiry before the unfamiliar work can teach anything.
Curiosity
The straight stripe has been going over and under all along.
A settled desire to understand rather than remain content with unexamined assumptions.
Curiosity moves a maker toward something not yet understood. An unfamiliar rhythm, material, tradition or pattern can become a question worth following. Look closely, learn its context and try an appropriate study. The aim is understanding that can change what you notice and make, rather than collecting impressive references.
Curiosity gives new possibilities discovered through understanding
You examine a woven sample you are welcome to handle. From a distance it seemed to be a set of simple stripes. Up close, each thread takes a small over-and-under journey. You try the relationship with strips of paper and find a checker pattern emerging. The material has answered one question and suggested another. Your own study begins with attention to what this example is doing.
Finding the balance in Curiosity
An illustrative everyday situation
Explore how an unfamiliar woven pattern creates its effect, then try a study of your own.
A fitting response
Following a question
How does that crossing change the visible pattern?
Observation leads to a study and a more exact question.
Pursued too far
Collecting novelty
Another influence will make my work interesting by itself.
References accumulate without becoming understanding.
An influence becomes useful when it changes what you can notice or try.
When the situation changes
You learn that a design has a particular communal or ceremonial meaning. Explore the context rather than treating it as an anonymous decoration. Your next work may draw on the process you studied without copying the meaningful design.
What Curiosity makes possible
You can develop a larger expressive vocabulary and discover a medium that suits an intention. Curiosity also renews familiar work: a closer look at a repeated gesture may reveal a choice you have been making automatically.
Curiosity in ordinary life
Listening beyond habit
Listen closely to an unfamiliar musical form, seek a reliable explanation of one feature and hear the passage again.
A material study
Use an ordinary material you may handle to investigate texture or pattern, recording what changes when you alter one feature.
Nearby virtues, different work
Open-Mindedness
Curiosity actively seeks understanding. Open-Mindedness gives an offered alternative a fair hearing.
Attentiveness
Attentiveness stays with the detail. Curiosity follows the question that the detail opens.
Curiosity and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Decorative borrowing
Taking an unfamiliar surface without caring what it means is a counterfeit of Curiosity. Genuine inquiry asks about source and context.
Counterfeit: The endless reference hunt
Research can counterfeit Curiosity when it avoids every attempt to understand through making. A study lets the question become concrete.
How to cultivate Curiosity
Name one feature that puzzles or attracts you.
Observe it and seek a trustworthy account of its context.
Make a permitted study that tests what you think you have understood.
Try it today
Use materials and methods suited to your abilities and setting. Curiosity does not authorize hazardous experiments, intrusion or copying private work.
Choose an unfamiliar work or ordinary material you may inspect. Follow one question through observation, a source and a small study of your own. Credit the influence when sharing the study and respect restrictions on copying or handling.
In a diplomatic conversation
Explore an unfamiliar influence closely enough to learn.
Questions worth returning to
What has this example made me curious enough to examine?
What can I now try that I could only admire before?
Keep the practice proportionate
Use materials and methods suited to your abilities and setting. Curiosity does not authorize hazardous experiments, intrusion or copying private work.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
These are the materials on which genius is to work, and without which the strongest intellect may be fruitlessly or deviously employed.
The materials here are examples of earlier art made available in an academy. Looking into another tradition supplies something concrete to study, rather than a vague demand to be original.
Let us therefore study it wisely, be taught by it, kindled by it; all the while determining not to imitate or repeat it; to have either no art at all, or an art which we have made our own.
Morris asks for direct study of older art, rather than secondhand copying. Curiosity follows how a work was made until the influence becomes something understood.
The more extensive therefore your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled the more extensive will be your powers of invention;
Reynolds argues that invention can grow from acquaintance with earlier work. Exploring an unfamiliar method can enlarge what a maker is able to imagine.
Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson is describing encounter with the world outside the study. Following an attraction into unfamiliar material can disclose a question you did not know you had.
If you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of pasteboard, and put the pure colors in columns at the top and side;
Ruskin proposes a chart for experiments in mixing colors. Curiosity becomes easier to pursue when a question is turned into something the hands can test.
It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties,
Reynolds invites an inquiry into how an admired effect is achieved. A useful study goes beyond collecting attractive surfaces to exploring the decisions behind them.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson urges scholars to learn from lived activity. Watching a craft in practice can teach relations that a description alone leaves obscure.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Begin with a piece you want to make.