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

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

"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 )

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".