An idea which many artists at first rebel against, but are generally forced to accede to, is that of constraints breeding creativity. It can be galling, to one who considers themselves creative, to admit to all the confusion and terror that the white page or blank canvas can bring. All you have to do is make something, right? You’re supposed to be good at this, right?
Well, sure, but when starting form a blank slate you’re effectively doing several creative tasks simultaneously. You’re coming up with an idea, coming to understand how the idea might be expressed, and laying the aesthetic groundwork of that expression all at the same time. Sometimes it works just fine – most of us start by creating this way, after all, before we ever learn better. Eventually, though, when you try to sustain creative production and your vision and your capabilities expand, this starts to become a liability. Eventually, through happenstance, you will likely start a piece with some constraint – topic, format, style, whatever – and, most likely, to concede that this restriction, which seemed would be so burdensome, actually is making this much easier for you. Thus it has become something of a truism that constraint breeds creativity – but it’s worth examining the reason, or reasons, why this might be the case.
Each decision we make is made within a particular context – and, when it comes to art, each element of a work is placed relative to its sibling elements. Thus, figuring out the placement of this first element can be very difficult: You can try to place it carefully, attempting to account for the placement of all future elements, but this quickly becomes overwhelming to account for. Alternatively, you might just place it haphazardly, by whim, and then try to arrange around it later – but this might not work out, since by the time you begin to notice fundamental issues in arrangement it may be too late to fix them. Having a format to adhere to makes this much easier to approach – rather than placing this first element in the void, absent any context, you are instead placing it within a framework, one where its role is explicit and understood, where you don’t need to hold the entire possibility space of what this work might be in order to be able to craft a single piece of it. The form provides a guarantee that, as long as you adhere to its strictures, you’ll end up with something that at least kind of works structurally, and can focus simply on how the pieces fit into that structure.
Much of the time, a similar process happens in the artist’s mind even when they’re working outside of a formal framework. Before first touching ink to paper, the artist conjures to mind a feeling, a style, a direction, a set of founding principles to which they can hold and which will contextualize everything they do, even down to the first element placed, the interruption of the serene white page. Whether they are constrained externally or internally, formally or informally, the artist much choose the shape of their vessel before they begin pouring, lest they like Ikarus become overflown.
However, there are other benefits provided by constraint. Those of us who are tormented by perfectionist tendencies can find great relief in a context where perfection is categorically impossible – I mean, perfection is by definition always impossible, but overtly and undeniably so – where the most that can be striven for is approximation, imitation, and suggestion of the artist’s vision. This is, I believe, much of the enduring appeal of toys like Lego and Minecraft, even among older audiences – they provide the tools to very rapidly build the approximation of an idea, but granulated enough to make any ambitions towards high-detail realistic representation ludicrous. It is unusual for an artistic format to be as restrictive as Lego or Minecraft when it comes to fine detail, but regardless of its hypothetical extents adhering to any creative format will force you to abandon the shining unalloyed vision of your minds eye and begin to make compromises. Things stop being quite as you imagined, and begin to take forms dictated as much by the circumstances as by your whims. This is tremendously freeing – rather than trying to achieve an impossible ideal, you are instead trying to express your ideas imperfectly through a limited medium and skill-set. This was always, of course, the case – but the change of format forces you to admit it, at least for a time, until the mind adjusts and the ego catches up. Also, while it may hurt your pride to realize this, being forced to make these compromises usually tends to make your work better, integrating reality and adding texture and nuance, the sort of process that Bob Ross liked to call “happy accidents”.
Both this externally imposed context and this forced departure from your artistic instincts can be uncomfortable and challenging, but they can also be incredibly fun, forcing you to apply your skills in ways you’d never thought of before – and they will make you a better artist. Eventually, though, all too soon, you’ll be back where you were before, firmly constrained to the bounds of your new personal aesthetic, now grown into the shape of whatever mold you’ve poured it into – and so we must always seek new frontiers, new uncomfortable shapes to bend ourselves into, lest we become locked in place, mere parodic self-portraits.