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I have often thought of what is the relationship between craft and art, design, architecture, sewing or anything else right? I mean these are all different practices that work with similar elements. In making really fine distinctions between them, I don’t think really is worth a lot of effort. I will call myself a craftsman because I use craft in what I do. I will call myself an artist because I’m engaged with artistic issues in what I do. I think the most convenient term, I call myself a furniture maker and just let it sit at that. One of the best phrases I ever heard on the subject was that the artist uses skillful means to reach an unknown end. The craftsperson uses skillful means to reach a known end. And even that has its weaknesses, but it does kind of indicate the two currents there. We work with craft and we work with art, and we may see ourselves primarily as craftspeople in some cases, primarily as artists in others, but the artist uses craft to realize the idea - to make it physically real in most cases. A painter, we speak of the craft of painting. The craftsperson is working with ideas. I mean, the point of what we think of as hand-craft now is that we are imbuing an object, creating an object that expresses personality, that has a resonance on emotional levels beyond just the purely formal level and the purely functional level. Well, that resonance seems to overlap with what the artist works with.
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