> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done.

That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an attempt to avoid learning anything labelled "theory". The reality is that what you're likely to do without looking at what other people have done isn't going to be very creative and is likely way way inside the box and simplistic.

You're not really breaking the rules if you don't know the rules you're breaking; flailing around wildly in the dark isn't creative, it's just dumb luck if you happen to do something new. People who are truly creative, know exactly where the box is and ends and why they're breaking outside of it.

I guess you missed the bit where I mentioned that I considered study as important as practice, and that I've already got a lot of professional experience in other branches of the arts, so the notion of deliberate practice is fine with me. What I'm doing differently this time is giving my own taste equal priority with received knowledge instead of beating myself up for failing to meet some external standard. Accepting that many paintings will vary from their original goals as the price of enjoyable experimentation has proved to be a good bargain. I just got tired of being my own worst critic in hopes of pre-emptively avoiding possible disapproval.

I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation.

The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff

I agree. I'm not saying they're methodical, I'm saying you have to know the rules before you can forget the rules and let your real creativity come out.

While I'm sure there is some of this mentality among unpolished artists, I think you're wrongly conflating reproducibility of quality with creativity itself. A creative solution is often arrived at by the ability to generate a large number of ideas, iterating upon each or combining them in a novel fashion. The simplicity or lack of inhibition in the approach of an amateur can allow for this volume, because the amateur is not limited by the constraints of a more formal practice. These purposely hem in what is possible in exchange for useful constraints that result in work of a reliable quality. Successful artists have to learn balance the pursuit of technique without being stifled by its preciousness, in the same way that amateurs have to balance novelty with reproducibility. Excess in either case tends to result in poor work.

Neither is the pro limited, understanding other's idioms is not a constraint; knowledge is not a handicap to creativity. People who complain about losing their creativity if they know too much are just uncreative people lying to themselves in order to explain their lack of creativity.