There is a major difference between Art and Craft.

Craft is following a regular set of rules, like a recipe, in order to achieve a desired result. Whether your craft is macramé, ceramics, cooking, painting, sculpture, poetry or any other creative endeavor, you likely learned how to do by applying a set of commonly accepted rules or guidelines as to how to accomplish simple tasks, then moved on to more and more complicated ones.

Following the rules explicitly allowed you to generate a product consistent with the accepted forms of that product.

Art however, is when you have mastered the rules of Craft, and learned how to break them, or transcend them in order to create something that goes beyond mere product, but is “Art”, an example of the product that typifies or surpasses what had gone before.

The artist knows the rules well enough to be able to determine when it is acceptable to break them, or ignore them altogether. The first time an impressionist painter used green in human flesh tones, he was breaking established rules, but Van Gogh broke that rule all the time and his pieces helped to define modern art. e..e cummings ignored most of the rules of typography, grammar and capitalization, yet his poems are renown for their connection to the human condition.

Certainly, rules are important. Patterns, routines, orderly schedules and so on give us a sense of normalcy, a feeling that things are progressing just as they should. However, almost every advance in cooking, medicine, agriculture, marketing, engineering and science have all occurred because someone challenged the rules and tried something different.

Think about it, if nobody ever challenged the rules, then football would not be a passing game, and there would still be a jump ball after every basketball field goal.

Quite often rules outlive their usefulness. One example of this is the typewriter keyboard. It is illogically laid out the way it is simply because old-fashioned typewriters would jam up if folks typed too quickly, so the current arrangement of letters was intended to slow them down enough to allow the device to work without the keys jamming up. Now that we type on a screen, digital keyboard can handle much faster typing, yet the QWERTY arrangement still stands.

Rules can limit your thoughts and actions. Many folks say, “Well, that’s just the way we have always done it,” which prevents them from trying it any other way. Doing things differently will not work all of the time, of course, but shaking things up is one way to spark creativity and accomplish things you had not thought possible.

So when you are creating, look for opportunities to go beyond the standard form. Challenge yourself, and your media, to exceed expectation, to reach beyond the acceptable, and transcend Craft all the way to Art.