Expanding Your Toolbox: Adding to Your Skill Set

In the post Wire Wrapping IS "Real" Jewelry, I suggested that it's entirely unnecessary to expand your skill set to reach any social expectations, nor to justify the work you do, or the job title you give yourself. That "your work is worth something no matter what it entails beyond the heart you invest in it" and that you don't owe the world any investment into classes or tutorials or new tools in order to call yourself a jeweler or artist or photographer, or whatever your poison may be. And I say this because I truly believe a single skill, any single skill (in this case, wire wrapping) can provide an endless array of possibilities from which to draw and evoke in our work. I stand by this belief and I'll say it often. A film photographer can never touch a digital camera and still produce new, amazing images every single day. A painter can only use acrylics their entire lives and entrance us with their imagination. And that's really what it's all about, right? The power of our own creativity and imagination.

So why expand your skill set at all? Why add more tools to your tool box? I imagine there might never be any reason at all beyond an endless curiosity.

I've been (slowly) learning to solder and fold form metal. Can these skills be utilized in my wire wrapping? Of course. Does it enhance my work? Not necessarily. New skills and tools do not equal better work. Just different work.

So, for me, learning a new skill is less about improving my work (ie, becoming a "real" jeweler, as perceived by large subset of society) and more about a joy of discovery. Naturally, I can continue to discover new designs in wire wrapping, new ways to

utilize wire to express my creative goals. I never need to learn soldering or fold forming or cold connections. But, they are cool and I have an insatiable desire to learn, to always be learning, to never know all of anything.

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

It is not about how that skill can increase sales or improve my business or get me noticed or validate my work to society. For me, it's about nothing beyond what the journey with it can teach me.... teach me about myself and my art and my self-expression. If you learn a new skill, learn it for you. Grow from it. Enjoy it. But know that you don't owe it to anyone to do so. That it does not make you a better artist or jeweler or photographer or writer. It just makes you a different one. And what you do with that newness, my friend, is a whole other story.