Art or Craft ... Make or Reproduce?

Last night I fell asleep thinking about designs, options and directions for my future quilting projects. Visions of patterns I'd seen went through my head ... wild ideas that I've never seen from anyone else danced in my mind .... but more than anything, a fundamental question bobbed around rather annoyingly -- and it still remains unanswered. Maybe this is where art divulges from craft, I don't know. But here is the question I have to answer: am I content to replicate the patterns and projects I have seen countless people make before me, or am I brave enough to actually make a piece that comes from my soul?  Anyone who knows me knows that I am not at all a traditional person - my style is not typical from catalogs and patterns. While I can appreciate things like the following pictures:

  

Frankly, I have no interest whatsoever in making a quilt like this. Zip. Zilch. Nada. 

My quilting style is much more like this:

 But even these quilts are someone else's art quilts. It doesn't mean that I have to make a quilt that the world has never seen before .... or, does it? After all, why does the world need another replication of what already exists?

But then you get into the whole thought of gifts, or even just what to do with all the finished products. There's only so much wall space in my house to hang them. And bless my parents - they still display some of my earliest (read: most hideous) art projects from college. Well actually and before - my mom still has a Play-Dough "feast" I made in elementary school. But that's far from hideous. ;-) But I digress... back to, what would I do with all the quilts? If you get into selling them, then you have the temptation of being a slave to your audience and the thought of "Will this sell?" becomes at least some part of the subconscious design process.

I guess this is part of where my PICP comes into play .... while coming up with the design of what I will make next is one of the best parts for me, it's also the most arduous, difficult, and paralyzing. Arrrghhhh.

So, how do you balance all of this in your creative process, whether it's quilting, woodworking, architecture, goldsmithing, b-b stacking or any other creative endeavor?? Do you typically  work off patterns and make them just like you see them? Do you change it up somewhat? Do you completely wing it?? Is there a place for going straight from patterns at the beginning, to learn the tricks of the trade, and then at some point branch out and wing it in your own style? Hmmm .... meditations of a paralyzed creative mind.