The downside is, there are techniques and tools that make sense together. If you just start, maybe you find something interesting. Maybe you just spend days fee

The downside is, there are techniques and tools that make sense together. If you just start, maybe you find something interesting. Maybe you just spend days feeling frustrated because nobody told you it's a good idea to prime a canvas, or that metal solders better when its clean. My preference is to study techniques like I'd study anything else - learn the principles, etc, and stay pretty agnostic about what it actually means to make art. I mean, is art really about self-discovery? It's somewhat rare for a good artist to be particularly self-aware. Is art really about freedom? Art has consistently bloomed under absolutely absurd strictures - only being allowed to paint specific things, write on knife-edge-narrow themes, and so on. Seems to me that it's ideas like these that really seize control of the imagination. I've definitely known artists that have been permanently inhibited by internalizing one or another idea about what it is to make art. Tools, on the other hand, extend and alter the human senses. A screwdriver is a feeler you stick into the radio, oils are an invitation to a whole light-oriented conception of painting, a chisel tells you stuff about wood you'd never know just by running your hands over it. I don't really believe there's a raw sense-experience. I think everything we do is mediated socially, conceptually, technically. In this sense, to actively engage with the world, it makes sense to be greedy about grabbing every technical or concept that increases the engagement surface, or makes it more varied.