"Arch" wrote in message
...
This is a sort of follow up to Owen Lowe's excellent thread about our
history and whether I'm right or wrong, please add your thoughts.

Woodturning is a great and growing hobby and/or small business that many
seem to consider a second rate art form. Why? Probably the percentage
of our 'good enough' work to that highly acclaimed by a discriminating
public is the same as that for most other art/crafts. There are an awful
lot of happy hobby painters who are failed artists.

Are we too inbred? Isn't the great majority of our art work done to
please our peers? Are our peers discriminating critics or just an
ordinary support group? A true critique with no dissembling praise of a
picayune turning nowadays is hard to find. Are the really successful
artists in other mediums nice guys like our leaders who share their
knowledge and works and involve themselves with any and every level of
woodturning? Are our organizations, net forums, websites, magazines,
instant galleries and symposiums mostly geared toward hobbyists who
dabble in the difficult professions of good craft and fine art?

For me this state of affairs is fine and entirely satisfactory, but then
perhaps I shouldn't deplore the current state of the public's acceptance
of turned wood. I wonder if the efforts we make and objects we turn to
please each other and the objects that hold their own with other media
might not be mutually exclusive.

Just a thought. What's your take?

Strange you should bring this up, though perhaps you're looking at the same
Molly thread on WC as I was this morning. I'll cut and paste from an e-mail
I sent to another turner.

"Rejection and juries under discussion reminds me.

I can still remember a "how to enter juried shows" presentation I attended
years ago, where this ditsy (photographer) who was dean at the A&D
department at the college taught me a valuable lesson. She looked at a
piece I had turned end grain with both heart in and a knot with reaction
wood running on the side, and said "it has more than one center of interest.
It will distract people, and detract from the piece if you don't limit it."
The lesson? Never pay to have "experts" jury anything. I avoid shows with
a non-refundable jury fee now. Of course, it's easy to do, given my limited
production capability, but I always think back to her, and her type, who
think I can make a knot go away, as if I were a painter, and base their
judgment on that.

Oh well, all but one entry has been sent to the tender mercies of other
"artists," normally painters, so nothing to be done. Looks like today will
have abundant sunlight to shoot for the final one. They said they'd take
digital, so that's what I'll do."

I'd be nice to have a potter, a turner, and maybe a flat wood worker on the
jury. They would understand the limitations placed on us by method and
material, though works not in the current "trendy" genre might still be
rejected. We just do what we must to gain the opportunity to place our work
before the real jury - the buying public. I tend to shoot one standard
bowl, one spalted, and one interrupted edge as my three slides. A little
bit for the practical as well as the artsy types.