I am not sure why you feel the need to compare your Art- if you are expressing yourself and enjoying the creation have you not been rewarded? Why question the motives of those enjoying it because they might be just trying to make you feel better?

There would be few golfers if each quit because they would never compete in the US Open.

Is it frustration? A great artist is simply gifted with genius, it is in no way earned, a responsibility. having it, not having it, goes a long way to earning a living but creation is still a part of being human. i think you are too much a critic of laudable attempts- attempts which demonstrate your heart and place in the artistic community.

@Kenneth

Different people have different aspirations and needs. I am certain that many, if not most, golfers recognize they will never be no-handicap players but ask many golfers what shots they remember and they will describe that one moment when they hit the perfect shot. Then, for the few seconds the took to fly, they had reached the pinnacle of what that sport is.

Some people just do any art for the experience of the craft and the inherent desire to 'do' something. Others are much more driven to create something that goes beyond that; the pain is in the disconnect between desire and the ability.

I like it when people get something out of my pictures; it is much more meaningful when someone who is independent of any motive has a positive response.

It's the difference between your mother telling you are handsome and the female at a party who says the same thing.
I don't question my mother's motives, they are obvious but discountable.

People can sleep their way to the top regardless of talent in just about any creative field.

@ Ted Zeppelin

"People can sleep their way to the top regardless of talent in just about any creative field."

Who do you think that Mozart, DaVinci, YoYo Mah were screwing to be recognized as great artistis?

Lew, we have raised so many issues with your work. I have seen your site, and trully there are so many good images there, that made me even be jealous (in the good way), and I can totally connect with you. I am here for the creative criticism, which takes time and one might even fear to be honest or one does not care enough to be honest. But to be honest, I think that saying the truth is what a true friend does. The one that loved me most in my life, always started - concerning my work- by telling me the negatives, in his view, wisdom, age, knowledges, giving me always a very well argumented 'why'. He gave me the time to think about it, work it over again, and make corrections that would only make my work better. I think art is a learning, is a need, is a way of being, and if one can make art a way of living, then this could be great.

Thank you for saying what I also have inside... Rated.

Any art has basic craft requirements, requirements that demand skill, concentration, wide acquaintanceship with prevailing fields and basic abilities to see and understand. None of these guarantees art as a standard output. For me, at least, that comes on the rare occasion that all that gained ability serendipitously coordinates in an unexpected and almost miraculous way. Some people have the ability to manage this coordination regularly. Some manage it occasionally. I must struggle with fiddling around in my junkpile of experiments and sometimes something happens. Most times it doesn't but the capability to endure failure is probably what makes a professional artist. I have yet to attain that status but I keep trying.

@ Stathi,
I get what you say.
I think there are three major overwhelming impediments to getting useful critique here on Open Salon.
First) the images shown here are too small to really see and so viewers must 'fill in' the details of what they should be actually seeing to evaluate the image. After all, some of the art is in the execution.
Second) Most people here are reviewing the work and the thought of friends - and thus their comments are always colored by their wish to be nice to friends. Truthfully a negative comment here would be seen as hostile and 'not playing the game.'
Third) and most important, most viewers are relatively unknowing about the craft and the art of photography and so their responses are based on anything but the actual worth of the art in some absolute terms.

I know that taste in art, even amongst the knowing, varies but I can recognize skill and talent and ability even in those images I don't like. I think getting worthwhile, knowledgeable useful critique on your art here on open salon is unlikely.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Lew

@ Jan Sand

"...sometimes something happens. Most times it doesn't but the capability to endure failure is probably what makes a professional artist."

I know nothing about poetry and so I can't have an opinion that is useful and meaningful in that realm. In general I agree with you that artists produce art and hope for that strike of lightening that makes a specific piece meaningful, even great.
The ability to produce one then lifts the others. For example, the photographer, Ansel Adams,; his work is uniformly technically perfect and the very occasional masterpiece makes even the dullest piece of his a treasure like a rag from the brow of Elvis Presley.

Thank you for reading and commenting.

Lew

I don't know a hell of a lot about poetry either. I personally know no other poets. I read the fiels and play with thoughts and words. I am trained as a designer which includes graphic arts and a half assed understanding of engineering and production techniques. Although I worked professionally I am not enthusiastic about my record in that area. I think I may have done some interesting graphic work. There is a link at my site. But I never rose out of amateur status in that area.

Sorry about the typos. I have a link at my site to my graphics.

Firstly, be very careful about trusting mirrors when it comes to judging your own work. For one thing, you are more conscious of the faults than anyone, and they're bigger on your radar than anyone else's.

Secondly,
Don't fall into the trap of saying that you won't belong to any club that would have you as a member. Just because someone likes your work doesn't make them an idiot.

@koshersalaami

As someone who tries to be creative a pat on the back is always appreciated but to take that appreciation seriously one must very carefully evaluate the appreciator. One must develop very strict and comprehensive standards to become competent in any craft or art and ones own standards must be the foundation on judgment. I like being liked but that is entirely different from accepting any appreciation of one's own work. The best artists are the ones who deeply understand and accept their failures.

@ kosher
"Firstly, be very careful about trusting mirrors when it comes to judging your own work. For one thing, you are more conscious of the faults than anyone, and they're bigger on your radar than anyone else's."

I think relative dissatisfaction with most of one's work is exactly what makes artists try harder to create and not get complacent.

"Don't fall into the trap of saying that you won't belong to any club that would have you as a member. Just because someone likes your work doesn't make them an idiot."

Most people are idiots (present company excepted of course) and part of the challenge of parsing praise is sorting out the source. I accept all praise and belief some of it.

Just for the record, almost every truly talented artist feels the same way you do and says many of the same things. It's only the untalented and delusional that rave on about their unrecognized genius and the glories of 'posterity'. You work is better than you think; and it will keep getting better because you don't think so.

All work is hard if you believe it is or don't have the skills lined up intellectually and emotionally. Some people struggle to be a good artist, others to be a good janitor.

Although the uneducated eye or ear may not be familiar with expert standards it should be acknowledged that all art, to have essential worth whatever its input of craft and skill and integrated with professional expertise, gains its general worth, not as a prime piece of academic accomplishment but as its impact on the world at large. The horrid prejudice that market value endows to a work is totally out of kilter with its inherent value which depends not only on its raw manipulation of sense input in a masterly way but also very much as to it interpenetrates current social values and how it incorporates them or conflicts in a powerful way against them. The whole mish-mash of all this totals as something worthwhile or something not effective.

As somebody who fiddles with art and struggles with housekeeping I am very respectful of good janitors.

@Stephen Axelrod
"Just for the record, almost every truly talented artist feels the same way you do and says many of the same things. It's only the untalented and delusional that rave on about their unrecognized genius and the glories of 'posterity'. You work is better than you think; and it will keep getting better because you don't think so"

Thank you for the comment.
TBH, I would have taken it a bit more to heart if the last sentence had started "I looked at your work and ,,,"

Lew

@jackie2
I have tried very hard to think that creating something worthwhile is easy and, sorrowfully, it has always remained difficult for me.

Lew

@ Jan Sand
" all art, to have essential worth whatever its input of craft and skill and integrated with professional expertise, gains its general worth, not as a prime piece of academic accomplishment but as its impact on the world at large."

I think that is the truth. I don't have that kind of ambition. Mine is limited to this; I want everyone who sees my pictures to come away thinking that they can see through the frame of the image to something else within.

Lew

I'm not telling you to be uncritical of your work or not to take the expertise of the critic into account

Science and art are not all that different as disciplines.Even with our limited sense apparatus and our restricted use of it out of culture and evolution the world is so abundant with cascades of input that our minds must ignore most of it to be effective and sane. We carefully select what we estimate what is important and disregard the bulk. Science and art change us by indicating what is ordinary can be extraordinary and what we see as extraordinary is ordinary. They open our windows to let a bit more of the world come in and that can be very disturbing to those with small minds or liberating to those who are somewhat more flexible. As one scientist noted, discovery occurs to a mind prepared to receive it.

These kinds of distinctions separate people from their natural inborn creativity. Put a big box of crayons in the middle of a group of eight year olds, and everybody wants to draw. By the time they are ten, they’ve self-selected, i.e. I can’t draw. Billy can draw.

I’ve been a professor at a college of art and design for twenty-six years. By the time a student enrolls in art school, they’ve become a creative tough guy, a hardy artsy salmon that swam upstream undeterred by prospects of income and career. I don’t worry about them. They will lead creative lives, whether they self-label as “artist” or not.

The ones who break my heart are those children who at age nine said, give the crayons to Billy, then lose touch with their creativity, their natural ability to see and find solutions to creative problems. I always felt that if George Bush took one painting class when he was at Yale, those eight Presidential years would have been different.

Everyone who feels the desire and impulse to look at the world with a camera or pencil or brush in hand should do that. It’s healthy. Making things is what humans do. Telling stories, making pictures, embellishing, decorating. Observe what others make, but comparing your work is like comparing curly brown hair to straight blond hair, blue eyes to brown.

One trait that artists have in common is courage. It’s an extraordinarily painful and lengthy process to acquire skill and master a practice while producing piles and stacks of awkward work. Critical skill develops much faster than technical skill and a seasoned eye. For years, nothing you make will look good enough. With painting, people laugh at what you produce (look at the Museum of Bad Art website, or the Spanish woman’s fresco ‘restoration’). Public perception of a successful artist as someone with a giant ego is more about dedication, courage, confidence, and ability to shake off the critics (yourself being number one at that).

Your assessment of your work and abilities is strong, and perhaps entrenched by now, but here’s the advice I’d give you in class. Make a hundred pictures this month, another hundred next month, and the one after that. What you photograph doesn’t matter. Stop thinking so much about that. A pile of cigarette butts will do just the same as a Himalayan vista–in fact better than the Himalayan vista, because my god, that’s already a sublime work of art, and everybody’s photos of Himalayan vistas look pretty much the same, like postcards. Photograph your bed just after you wake up, your morning coffee, your sink full of dishes with the light filtering over the suds. Record the beauty of the everyday. Show us a detail, shadow, or surface we missed. Make us see it in a different way. People aren’t doing that with their cell phone cameras. They are placing an image of an experience or subject in their life rolodex. Making art isn’t that, and much of it happens on an unconscious level. Make the unconscious conscious, then begin to manipulate your discoveries. Nine hundred pictures of your morning coffee will reveal crucial and vitally important information about the sound your artistic voice.

I wish you well.

P.S. Ditch the torture ;-)

I would say there is a difference between doing something artistic and being an artist. Just because I can come up with a good joke on the odd basis doesn't mean I should go on a stand up comedy tour. Doesn't mean my jokes aren't great, though. Denigrating one's efforts doesn't make one "honest" either.

It's not even about talent. It's about committment. Some people have to do what they do regardless of outcome. But there's more than one piece to the puzzle. Many great talents never come to light. Many non-talents do. Success lies in doing what you want to do - which is rare.

@Kenneth

" Make a hundred pictures this month, another hundred next month, and the one after that. What you photograph doesn’t matter. Stop thinking so much about that. A pile of cigarette butts will do just the same as a Himalayan vista–in fact better than the Himalayan vista, because my god, that’s already a sublime work of art, and everybody’s photos of Himalayan vistas look pretty much the same, like postcards. Photograph your bed just after you wake up, your morning coffee, your sink full of dishes with the light filtering over the suds. Record the beauty of the everyday. Show us a detail, shadow, or surface we missed. Make us see it in a different way. "

As a photographer I make hundreds of pictures a month; in a particularly productive period, perhaps thousands. It isn't the bloom of creativity I am missing; what bothers me - and the greatest proportion of photographers I know - is that they lack that unmeasurable touch of insight and talent that makes what one creates wonderful.

Without meaning to offend, but in the spirit of telling the truth, it is the tiniest bit condescending to think that homilies and practices that work for a class of students young in their field would serve equally well as a lesson for someone fairly mature both in their abilities and their critical sense.

Lew

It's interesting that cheshyre grin commented with a comparison to humor insofar as producing art is concerned. In humor there are two standard techniques that some people enjoy but I am not entertained. One is to become grossly offensive. The other is to do something openly stupid. Some artists pursue their art with the same techniques. Occasionally it works, or at least it seems to gain popularity.
The humor I like most is startling in its cleverness and I like the same things in art.

Love the title!

Especially in the context of the blogging forum known as Open Salon.

An actual mirror can be a useful tool for getting a fresh look at a painting-it tricks the brain into seeing it fresh. I understand well the hunger and the desire- all artists have it, as well as the doubts. Picasso, in his truly great period, trusted poets most and their greeting was always "How goes the work?" and his answer "Terrible" which all could see was not true.
I have known poor artists achieve a level of fame by being good bullshitters, as I know successful administrators for the same reason. In art it does not hold up long.
Desiring to do more, the dark nights of the soul, the awe of really great work- I often come back from one of Liz Osborne's shows doubting I could match some of her intuitive strokes, then when I go with Liz and she laugh, "you have no idea how much work goes into being intuitive." and its back to the studio.
"How goes the work?"

I have never advised something like a hundred pictures a month formula- sometimes the work is simply visualizing, is there another Kenneth here? production line is nothing like art.

Lew, I'm an outsider that has just looked through your portfolio with the mind set of a retired illustrator and instructor. I am truly impressed by what you've captured based on how your work affected me on a "personal" level. I see a story behind each piece, my own "visual" story. That's a talent most artists have difficulty achieving and one that I'd always tried to instill in my students regardless of their artistic abilities.

For me, If I were to see a photo, or a work of fine art, of a flower I would more than likely think, "Alright here we have the obvious; A flower. Yet, if I saw a portion of a single petal of that same flower I could visualize that petal as a whole, or a singular facet, in any artistic setting/realm I wished because the artist has allowed "me" to create my own visual. Let's take a rural landscape, " Here again we have the obvious, a landscape with a barn." ( I call these "couch paintings" by my own preference with no intent to discredit those in which this type of art is preferred) But..zone in on one aspect of that barn..be it the latch, part of a dilapidated window or a piece of a broken stoop etc. and you've handed me the right to, again, create my own visual. Tell me a story or allow me to visualize my own tale and you've drawn me in. You've accomplished that.

Your second work in your 14 favorites photo's portfolio is a "whole" and still allows me to use my own "visual" senses. I have no idea where that fellow is walking to but you've led me to imagine by own beginning and my own end of his story. (BTW I have a strong preference to blk & wh photography). Your 5th piece in your Europe collections, takes me down a path I want to visually see the end of. It doesn't matter where it leads because, again, you've allowed me to visualize that end on my own. The faces, the fellow sleeping on the bus, each one tells a story though their stance, the lines on their faces, the look of their eyes. I can't find anything more impacting than that in the visual and fine art world.

For that alone, you've become a master. Allow yourself comfort in knowing you are letting others experience a journey through their eyes by offering them look through yours. And..I thank you for that.
~r

I think the creative arts (as opposed to the interpretive arts like acting, singing, dancing) divide themselves into two groups quite easily. The first is composing, sculpting, painting, drawing - in which the technical skills are quite difficult, the estimation of skill relatively easy through commonly known values and the gap between hacker and skilled performer is fairly obvious. That is the lucky group.

The second group, writers and photographers, is less lucky. The technical obstacles are minimal and thus each attracts an overwhelming multitude of people who attempt to exorcize their creative urges. There are a multitude of skill levels the difference between mawkishly amateurish and slightly proficient is obscure and so people can float forever trying, without trying, to be an artist.

Photography has been especially undone for two reasons. First, the advances in equipment and automation have totally erased the formerly imposing technical barriers and secondly the Internet has increased the view and visibility of each individual photographer. So there are million of photographers flooding the world with hundred of millions of decently exposed, decently focused pictures.

And since, to the vast proportion of people, a properly focused and exposed picture is a good picture, there are millions of people who think they have some native talent, when actually it is the equipments' ability. 'Automatic' cameras get one to a reasonable plane of proficiency but the next step requires some work to become actually proficient.

All the while they are working they are exposed to a flood of images, and some proportion of this flood are actually really good. The lowered technical barriers and increased spread of knowledge means that tru talent has more of a chance of being uncovered and, in my opinion, there is more good to great to superb work being displayed in any one day, than was available during the entire last century. So the bar to being 'good' has been raised to almost an absurdly high level.

Even so, undaunted, some large number of photographers work hard at proficiency and then, after that 1, 2 or 3 years of work, they come up against the fact that technique and experience aren't enough, when they reach for the talent lever, it just isn't there. So they become pixel peepers who specialize in technique and equipment ad absurdum or they go off into arcane specialties that require more work and skill but put off the need for real artistic talent.

And what there is left is still some vast pool of skilled, creative photographers, pretty much like me, who know that, no matter how hard they work, they will always be at some lower tier, trying hard always to catch the fire and hoping against experience that sometime they will.

@ kenneth,

sorry my mistake, it was greenheron's comment.

@through my eyes,

thanks for looking at my pictures and thank you for taking the time to comment. That one you referred to was taken from a moving train and, like the progeny of a difficult pregnancy and delivery, is more dear to me just because of the technical obstacles surmounted to get a good (in my eyes) picture.

Lew

I suppose I would understand this better if I thought of myself in that light, an artist or a writer and if I came to OS looking for critique, I would be sorely disappointed. I have seen some ask and receive it warmly and without reserve, I have seen others get unsolicited criticism that had another purpose behind it that was painful. For me, I was tired of writing my poems to myself and wondered did anyone feel the same as I did, about life, nature, marriage, hope and loss. I found there was a world of people all over the world that did. That was enough for me, and is enough for me. Hoping you find a forum for what you are looking for Lew, you are a talented photographer and your personal essays were insightful and so well put together, again from a lay person's perspective. If you decide to share here, I will be reading and admiring. Hoping that isn't a disappointment.

I wish I had time to look at what are obviously thoughtful comments below, from your fellow artists. But, I have some art to make today.

So, Mr. Salieri, your work is important and it is yours. Make it the best you can.

The only standards you must live up to are your own. It's true, we all develop taste alongside developing our skill - and we frequently mix up the two. Keep developing(no pun intended) your skill.

Imitate. After enough imitation, you begin to see the art in your own efforts. After all, great musicians do not begin by writing sonatas, they play the sonatas composed by others.

I guess I'm just saying comparing your work and your skill to others is not going to help you improve. Imitating is the way to go until you hear your own voice.

Click on, compadre. A lot of folks must understand. Look at the number of responses. We're with ya, man.