At the end of my undergrad degree, I crammed almost all of the class requirements for my art minor into one semester. I came from a music background, and suddenly, I had a schedule full of freshman art major classes. And I was a stranger in a foreign land because the culture was SO different.
I went from spending time with musicians who had a very clear sense of responsibility for WORKING on their art for a set number of hours every day(even if they didn't actually meet their own expectations), to being surrounded by a group of students who would putter and putz their way through class because they 'worked better at home' or didn't do their homework because they 'weren't in the right mood to create.' What a shift in world view!
When I first encountered this attitude, I thought it was a freshman-thing... A superiority world view, left over from being a big fish in the little pond of high school. I expected my art professors to be like my music professors, I expected that the freshmen would be taught to produce a steady volume of ever-improving work. Perhaps the professors let their grading system give the feedback on this permisive culture of internally inspired production....but I don't think so. This seems to have been the accepted belief system in the art world.
When I approached my art exercises as a musician, there were quite ripples throughout the art department. To a musician, practice means that you work on the same set of skills in the same way, 5-7 times a day, for a week. At the end of the week, you present all of your work for critique, highlighting your best success as proof of your increase in skill. For larger projects, you spend your allotted time, every day, working on one aspect of the larger goal. Hopefully, at the end of the deadline, you've spent enough time on your art, your work, your music, to produce a piece that meets the standards of excellence. If you fail to meet your intended outcome, the fault is in the amount of time that you spent on preparation, or in your strategic approach to your work. Obviously, my approach to practicing (the norm in the music department) was something bizarre, but note worthy to the art professors.
So, I'm not done thinking about this idea yet, but for today, I would like to know.... When it comes to quilting, are you an artist or a musician?