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The answer to this implied question is a resounding "Yes!" It encompasses both. The terms are simply not mutually exclusive. Anyone who decides to set their skills to task and make a quilt (or a painting, novel, sculpture, gourmet meal, garden design...you name it) is embarking on a creative process, regardless of whether they choose to work free-form or tap into established forms.

Every day millions of people pick up cookbooks and try to recreate an excellent culinary experience. They try to follow the recipe patterns, to make their work taste and look like the descriptions and photos in the books, or on the Food Network. They may succeed or fail, but even failure resulting in regurgitation doesn't diminish the fact that they engaged in a creative process.

On any given day at the world's great art museums, several art students can be found sketching and copying from the masters. They use their own creative skills, yet draw from the brilliance of those who went before to refine their work and their vision. These artists don't draw their likeness of The Birth of Venus intending to pass it off as plagiarism, and they are not considered frauds for their efforts.

In very few endeavors do people create absolutely without reference to historical designs, influences and tools. Quilts are primarily designed not from individual small pieces of fabric, but from Blocks. Blocks are units of configured pieces that create an affect on perspective and design. Every art form has universally pleasing, time-tested building blocks, which the artist then uses to either follow or break the rules, as they wish. An architect can create new buildings using windows or flying buttresses. A quilter can create new quilts using Attic Windows or Flying Geese. Standard design elements make up pattern basics that have been evolving over hundreds and even thousands of years, around the globe, in every art form.

There are extremely creative quilters who push the limits on new design, and there are average and below-average quilters who nonetheless experience the joy of making something with their own hands, and putting it out to the world as a testimony to their creative process. There are excellent writers who consistently connect with readers, and there are writers who meticulously follow a formula intended to guarantee success. One may be more accomplished, and more independently creative, but that doesn't negate the fact that the latter is applying his skills in a creative process that suits his ability.

Quilting is always a creative process, whether or not the artist works from someone else's pattern. The end result from a pattern will always have variations, either from the artist changing the color schemes and textures, or from the artist's own personal style of errors and blunder-correction.

If Fine Art disallows methodologies that will effectively bring it into the hands of the people, then we all lose our freedom of expression.

Learn more about this author, Gilson Penny.
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