Musing about my brief life as an artist
 

Happy is the man who is satisfied to _push himself to turn ever more
useful and/or handsome round, off center or eccentric turned pieces.
Also fairly content is the person who is _pulled beyond the lathe and
has the ability and the talent (which is inborn) to produce objects of
beauty and/or meaning. They may not be round and may not show any
kinship with the lathe. Not so fortunate is the able turner who lacks
the talent but feels the pull. He suffers the misery of knowing that
although he can push til doomsday with his brain and muscles, his soul,
spirit, genes or whatever make the lathe his limit. He can take
lessons, practice, study art and design, beg for critiques, push, push,
push. Further, he can justify, belittle, scorn, compensate and deny.
Trying to fool himself doesn't work. In the end when he can exert the
_push and ignore the _pull he will be a turner at peace with his lack of
talent and can fully enjoy his craft. Anybody you know?

This nonsense,must be due to listening to the "Pathetique" on a CD, or
wondering about the implications of Good Friday, or maybe just the gray
skies today. More likely it's due to the undeniable failure of a 'work
of art' I tried to make this morning.

I'm not one to bellyache for very long, so.. A Blessed Easter Sunday or
a good day, April 11th to all, whatever your beliefs or if you have
none.

Thanks for letting me work thru my ill- fated art phase. Mercifully,
unlike my posts, it was brief. Arch

Fortiter,

Musing about my brief life as an artist
 

Arch,

Woodturning is no different from the other art forms, or whatever else we might
persue in life. 10% will have the natural talent and ability to excell, and
20% will never get it at all, no matter how hard they try or how much money
they spend.

I am thankful to just be lost somewhere in the 70% with everybody else.


Russ Fairfield
Post Falls, Idaho
http://www.woodturnerruss.com/

Musing about my career as an artist . . . (long)
 

Well Guys and Gals, I am an "artist", per se. I am a formally trained
visual artist and have had a successful career over the last 40 years as
both a fine artist and commercial artist. Additionally I have taught art
classes for the over 18 years and have won enough ribbons to fill a trash
can (and, yes, that's exactly what happened to them)

Four things I want to offer for your consideration. First of all, artists
struggle and quite often fail . . . just like everyone . . . to create
"art". Now, I can create, in the opinion of others,
"Be-e-a-a-u-u-t-t-i-i-ful things", but in truth I am only fortunate enough
to move from being but a skilled craftsman to creating a piece of "art" once
in a blue moon. People often say, "Everything you do is wonderful". The
truth is, "artists" create a lot of crap as well! We've just learned to
show only that which worked! A successful professional photographer I know
says he often shoots three rolls of film to get one good photo! Using that
ratio, and presuming 36 exposure rolls, he shoots 107 failures to get 1
success and yet we expect 1 out of 1 of ourselves.

Secondly, EVERYTHING is an art. Sometimes "art" is just in your approach to
the process, and has little to do with the end product. "Art" happens when
it's three o'clock in the morning and your still at something and you are so
wrapped up in it that you suddenly realize you haven't eaten since breakfast
and the family quietly went off to bed hours ago . . . It's kind of like
safe drugs.

Thirdly, while I can envision "art" in it's many forms, I, too, don't often
have the appropriate skills to "pull it of". Everyone "ooh's and ah's" at
what I can do as a fine artist, but what they don't know is that actually I
yearn to do the kind of "art" that others excel at . . . play the piano,
play a great game of golf, and yes . . . turn a well crafted piece on my
lathe!

. . . and lastly, quite often we are the victim of what we and others
presume "art" is.

-Verne


"Arch" wrote in message
...
Happy is the man who is satisfied to _push himself to turn ever more
useful and/or handsome round, off center or eccentric turned pieces.
Also fairly content is the person who is _pulled beyond the lathe and
has the ability and the talent (which is inborn) to produce objects of
beauty and/or meaning. They may not be round and may not show any
kinship with the lathe. Not so fortunate is the able turner who lacks
the talent but feels the pull. He suffers the misery of knowing that
although he can push til doomsday with his brain and muscles, his soul,
spirit, genes or whatever make the lathe his limit. He can take
lessons, practice, study art and design, beg for critiques, push, push,
push. Further, he can justify, belittle, scorn, compensate and deny.
Trying to fool himself doesn't work. In the end when he can exert the
_push and ignore the _pull he will be a turner at peace with his lack of
talent and can fully enjoy his craft. Anybody you know?

This nonsense,must be due to listening to the "Pathetique" on a CD, or
wondering about the implications of Good Friday, or maybe just the gray
skies today. More likely it's due to the undeniable failure of a 'work
of art' I tried to make this morning.

I'm not one to bellyache for very long, so.. A Blessed Easter Sunday or
a good day, April 11th to all, whatever your beliefs or if you have
none.

Thanks for letting me work thru my ill- fated art phase. Mercifully,
unlike my posts, it was brief. Arch

Fortiter,

Musing about my career as an artist . . . (long)
 

"vrhorton" wrote: (clip) A successful professional photographer I know
says he often shoots three rolls of film to get one good photo! Using that
ratio, and presuming 36 exposure rolls, he shoots 107 failures to get 1
success and yet we expect 1 out of 1 of ourselves.(clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Your point is well taken, and I don't disagree with your conclusion, but, as
a serious amateur photographer myself, I have to say this. I believe his
process, of vastly over-shooting a subject, is directly attributable on the
development of 35mm photography. The advancements in digital photography
threaten to make it even worse. And I am guilty of this myself--it is
easier to shoot lots of pictures than it is to make each one count. In the
"good old days" of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Steiglitz, when each
exposure represented a considerable investment in time and materials, they
might spend an hour setting up a single photograph. And I believe, because
they thought about what they were doing very carefully, their pictures were
better. In other words, rapid firing is not marksmanship, nor is it art.

I think the way woodturners work is more analogous to the way the old
photographers worked. We don't make a hundred bowls in the hope of getting
a good one. We make each bowl with the expectation that it will be a
"keeper." And each failure is a disappointment. Our success rate has to be
much better than one in a hundred, or we would give up...or go insane.
(Maye some of us have G)

Musing about my career as an artist . . . (long)
 

"vrhorton" wrote in message
...
Well Guys and Gals, I am an "artist", per se. I am a formally trained
visual artist and have had a successful career over the last 40 years as
both a fine artist and commercial artist. Additionally I have taught art
classes for the over 18 years and have won enough ribbons to fill a trash
can (and, yes, that's exactly what happened to them)

Four things I want to offer for your consideration. First of all, artists
struggle and quite often fail . . . just like everyone . . . to create
"art".

Snip

A decade ago, I had the wonderful fortune of having my employer pay for me
to visit London. As luck would have it, we had plenty of free time to sight
see.

We spent few hours at "The National Gallery" I had the opportunity to view
some of Leonardo Da Vinci's work. IMHO it stood head and shoulders above the
most of the other displayed works of that period. I can a across what the
called a "cartoon", a charcoal sketch of one of the finished pieces. I had
an epiphony of sorts:

Great art is as much engineering as it is inspiration. What I had not
previously understood is that he did not just "pull this out of his a**"; it
was the result of numerous "studies" and "prototypes" and/or "cartoons".

Let that be a lesson to all of us "artists in (perpetual) training". It even
took Da Vinci a few stabs to "nail it".