Jack wrote:
On 10/3/2012 3:33 PM, Mike Marlow wrote:
SonomaProducts.com wrote:

I create
beautiful things in wood. I have pretty much sold everything I ever
offered for sale. I have tossed aside my failures. Not everyone will
love or even like what I do. I think of it like a pair of shoes. I
think most of them are ugly but somebody is buying them. I just buy
the ones I like. My art is offered in the same way.

Then don't sell or give your "art" to people who will not respect
your "artistry". You clearly think too much of yourself and not
enough of others. Just build your stuff to satisfy yourself and
don't burden the rest of the world with what they can't possibly
understand. Build it, admire it and go to sleep at night patting
yourself on your own back. Just quit bitching that others don't see
it your way. You may do very nice work, but you sir, are no artist.
An artist is concerned for what the viewer sees. You are only
concerned for what you want them to see.

I think you are confused. A businessman may be concerned about what
others see, artists almost never care, and many do their life's work
unnoticed until long dead. Myself, I'm certainly not an artist, nor
am I a business man. I do woodwork for my own enjoyment, same reason
I like to program, or shoot pool, or take pictures. I don't do any of
these things for money, and don't particularly care who likes my stuff
besides me.

On the other hand, My daughter just got married and I made her an
Irish wedding goblet out of a gorgeous hunk of black walnut cut from
a friends yard years ago and sitting in my shop waiting for a special
occasion. It turned out pretty nice considering I haven't done much
lathe work in years but I was still hoping she liked it. She cried
when she saw it because I made it I guess. My buddy came in from out
of town for the wedding and when he saw the captured rings on the
goblet, he reminded me I made him a baby's rattle 35 years ago when
his son was born with captured rings, and he just gave it to his son
for his new baby.
That's how "gardeners" gauge value, and when you want to take a custom
made wooden gift into the shower, you insult the gardener, when you
still have the gift 35 years later, and pass it down to your children,
you make the gardener smile, even when he is is a crotchety old man.

The difference is that you passively got to enjoy those moments. You did
not dictatte those moments. One cannot presume to dictate what others
should appreciate, which is what I was trying to say in my original
comments.

--

-Mike-