# Creative Strategies and How Artists Select

Painting I · Analysis, Project and Presentation · https://tryals.app/learn/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select

## Two Operations, Never Simultaneous

In 1950, J. P. Guilford separated **divergent** from **convergent** thinking. Studio practice confirms this distinction. Producing possibilities and choosing between them are separate tasks. Doing both at once ruins the work.

Generation and selection must be separated **in time**. Produce thirty sketches without judgment. Return the next day to choose three.

### Generative Strategies

| Strategy | What it does |
|---|---|
| **Chance procedures** | Removes personal preference from decisions |
| **Constraint** | Forces unexpected outcomes |
| **Transposition** | Remakes work in another medium or scale |
| **Appropriation** | Uses an existing image as raw material |
| **Working from a corpus** | Builds from a collection rather than a single idea |
| **Deliberate error** | Repeats a mistake to explore its potential |

Duchamp's *3 Standard Stoppages* (**1913-14**) demonstrates this approach. Dropped threads formed new units of measurement. The crucial step was the **adoption** of those random lines.

### Selection and Editing

Picasso painted *Guernica* following the bombing of Gernika on **26 April 1937**. He worked on the canvas from **1 May to 4 June**. The painting measures **349.3 by 776.6 centimetres** (349.3 · 776.6). Picasso preserved forty-five studies. Most of their initial elements vanished from the final canvas.

Selection is not minor refinement. It is the deliberate removal of viable material. 

Ask three questions during selection:

* Does this answer the primary question of the work?
* Is this choice intentional, or merely an unexamined habit?
* Is the effect visible in the room, or only in your explanation?

> **Common pitfall:** treating discarded work as waste. The preliminary studies are not failures. They represent the search that makes the final work possible. Generating few options skips this necessary search.

## Practice questions

7 of this lesson's 13 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. A student has made thirty thumbnails and cannot choose between them, so she begins improving the three she likes and abandons the rest the same afternoon. Why does that ordering damage both operations?

A. Personal preference in selection leads favoured sketches to miss viable divergent options.
B. Judging halts search early; refining before selection commits effort to uncompared options.
C. Premature refinement stops corpus work, as thumbnails require scaling up to be evaluated.
D. Producing thirty thumbnails overloads cognition; convergent editing should start after three.

**Answer:** B. Judging halts search early; refining before selection commits effort to uncompared options.

**Why:** Once effort has gone into three, the comparison is no longer between thirty options but between three developed ones and twenty-seven sketches, and the sunk effort decides it. Separating the two operations in time is what keeps the comparison honest. Thirty is a reasonable number and liking is a perfectly good starting criterion.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/a-student-has-made-thirty-thumbnails-and-cannot-choose-between-them

### 2. Complete the account of strategy and selection.

**Answer:** Guilford separated divergent from **convergent** thinking in 1950. Duchamp made the 3 Standard Stoppages by dropping three threads one metre long from a height of one **metre**. Gernika was bombed on 26 April 1937 and Picasso worked on the canvas until **4** June. Around forty-five preparatory **studies** survive, dated and numbered by the artist.

**Why:** The first blank is the one worth holding on to. Divergent and convergent are not good and bad kinds of thinking; they are two necessary operations that interfere with each other, and almost every studio problem described as a block is one of them being run at the wrong moment.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/complete-the-account-of-strategy-and-selection

### 3. Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages was made by dropping three threads a metre long from a height of one metre and keeping the curves they fell into.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True**, and the interesting part is what happened next: the curves were kept as units of measurement. Chance produced the shapes and a decision adopted them as a standard, which is why the work is about the authority of a unit rather than about randomness.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/duchamps-3-standard-stoppages-was-made-by-dropping-three-threads-a

### 4. Arrange the stages of a generate-then-select working method in order.

**Answer:**

1. Fix the question the work is trying to answer
2. Generate widely, without judging anything
3. Leave the material alone for long enough to stop feeling attached to it
4. Compare all the options against each other at the same level of finish
5. Develop only what survived the comparison

**Why:** The middle step is the one students omit and the one that does the work. Attachment is formed by effort, so comparing on the same day as making is comparing against how much each one cost you. A day away is usually enough to make the comparison about the work instead.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/arrange-the-stages-of-a-generate-then-select-working-method-in-order

### 5. Gernika was bombed on 26 April 1937 and Picasso finished the canvas on 4 June. How many days is that?

**Answer:** 39 (within ±5)

**Why:** **39 days.** A canvas of more than 27 square metres, from an event to a finished painting, in under six weeks, with around forty-five studies made inside that period. The compression is part of why the work is what it is, and it is worth knowing before assuming that a considered painting must be a slow one.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/gernika-was-bombed-on-26-april-1937-and-picasso-finished-the-canvas

### 6. Selection requires the deliberate removal of viable material, rather than minor refinement. What follows from this distinction when an artist evaluates preliminary studies?

A. Viable material is discarded to serve the core focus
B. Discarded studies are judged as outright visual errors
C. Every initial component must appear in the final piece
D. Unselected studies demonstrate an inefficient procedure

**Answer:** A. Viable material is discarded to serve the core focus

**Why:** Preliminary studies are not failed attempts; discarding viable material is necessary to answer the primary question of the work. Conflating selection with mere error correction overlooks how robust ideas must often be pruned to achieve ultimate focus.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/selection-requires-the-deliberate-removal-of-viable-material-rather

### 7. Divergent and convergent thinking work best when carried out at the same time, so that weak ideas are removed as soon as they appear.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**, and it is the failure the distinction exists to name. Judging during generation removes options before they are legible, so the search stops at whatever was already familiar. The two operations interfere, which is why the working rule is to separate them in time and preferably in place.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/painting-i/creative-strategies-and-how-artists-select/divergent-and-convergent-thinking-work-best-when-carried-out-at-the