Art/Craft/Artwork/Craftwork

Words like art and craft have been used in many different ways, and still are, so I thought it was time to re-examine them once more - especially since I use them in the name of this blog. What is important is not only the definitions of the words themselves, but how they relate. Without good relations, they are nothing.

CRAFT - always a good place to start. Craft is what you learn from other people, even if it is via a course, book, internet or observation. You are not the original source, you have collected it from someone else. An essential aspect of Craft is Skill - an aspect that can be improved upon by practice and more knowledge and where the result can be easily observed. Knowledge is another aspect, it is essentially a passive pool upon which we can draw. The limitation of Craft is that the human pool of Craft is so huge that it is easy to believe that it contains everything you need to do your job, a fallacy more common than you might believe.

ART - is what you learn from yourself or observation of the world. You are the original source. A caveat is that many people may form the original source for the same thing, because there are an awful lot of people on this planet and many are thinking about the same kind of things. Art is incredibly hard to teach because once we know something then it it passes from Art to Craft. Skill is only an aspect of Art as a dynamic because there is no time to learn and hold skill before it becomes Craft. Art is the source of Craft, and all the time Art is being done then the pool of Craft is being filled with fresh Craft.

Art and Craft are, of course, independent of any field, and may be found equally in oil painting as it is in nuclear chemistry.

CRAFTWORK - Once could equally say 'Work of Craft' and compare it with 'Work of Art', but that form is merely more wordy. A work is the thing external to the body, that which is expelled from the mind and body, through whatever medium is deemed suitable. If I go and make a cake from a recipe, or from a recipe I remember creating before, then I have produced Craftwork. You may eat my Craftwork, or record it on film, or even display it or images of it. I have made real an original idea that somebody else had, or which I have had and previously expressed.

ARTWORK - This is the same as Craftwork, except this is something new, never expressed before to your knowledge. It could be a cake to a new recipe I have just created in my mind.

So Art is within our mind and body, Craft is outside it in some form since it has been expressed and we have received it - even if it is the reception of our own expression. Once we have created an Artwork through the expression of our Art, our Art becomes Craft while the Artwork remains Artwork.

Art is never pure Art, because we humans seem incapable of producing anything not at least partly based on what we have already received. That new cake recipe relies heavily on the Craft of cake that we already have. If we managed to produce 100% Art we would have no means of receiving it - it would seem a random mess because our brain has no method of processing things that are not at least partly known. (This has an interesting aside in the question of how did we learn to perceive anything as a child, and how did the first ever piece of life perceive anything).

I hope that sums up well enough my feeling of the definitions of these words in a way which consistently explains the differences between them.