7.29.2010

Letters

As I was saying in my last post, while I was on vacation a ton of things ran through my head that I felt I needed to get off my chest on my blog.
I know I've comments on Ceramics Monthly in the past and I even think a few years ago I was on a roll with some sort of commentary each month about weather I liked that months issue or not. Well, I was excited to see Victoria Christen's pots on the cover. I love her work and I enjoyed seeing her a few years ago at Arrowmont as well. This edition, as most of you have already seen has alot of studio visits in it. I do enjoy reading these because I can tell just by the interview weather or not I think I would like to meet that potter or not regardless of their work. I'm sort of getting off track of why I was posting this evening so here below I did a quick scan of what really caught my eye this month.


......LETTERS!

I do find this section of the magazine at times pretty interesting especially when someone has such a beef about something that they feel the need to vent in writing. If a letter starts off with " In all due respect to last month article...blah, blah, blah" or "After reading blah, blah, blah, I found that I was upset by....." I sit their in my chair and think "Oh yeah, this one going to be good!"

Most of the time I don't agree with what ever they are ranting about but I find their view interesting. So...this month a letter about Emerging Artists caught my attention. As soon as I read a sentence saying that they found it hard to read through "their ramblings", I started feeling really sorry for those emerging artists. I was thinking about how hard it is to come up with an artist statement and if your in the academic world, its even harder because you feel like you have to say something REALLY deep about your work!

I guess truthfully I, like most people I think, skim through the artist statement unless I find something interesting and I mostly look at the photo's and at times think " Wow, wish I had been an Emerging Artist"!

So, nothing against the person who wrote this letter. Everyone has a right to say what they feel and I respect that in people just as long as they don't pull me down their path. I just thought I point out how entertaining the Letter section is and how the written word can really make or break the way you feel about someone.

(Boy, I think I just ended this post with a deep thought!)

3 comments:

FetishGhost said...

I'm in love with the written word. As someone that really has no idea how to express exactly what it is that I do to the rest of the world, I drool over a well written artist statement.
I know that I'm not alone in this and my sympathies go out to those of us that make the attempt and manage to muck it up, but I really enjoy those that make it work.
I do feel that I need to stand and applaud Ceramics Monthly for challenging me on a regular basis. They've managed to be more and more relevant to my long term development than a good amount of the time I spent in a classroom.

Tracey Broome said...

I had a post not too long ago about this letter. It inspired me to sit down and write an artist statement, although mine was very simple and to the point, much different than what you would read in some of the emerging artist features in CM.(probably why I am not an emerging artist!) I have to say I agreed with the letter to the editor somewhat. I hate to try and read through an artist statement that goes on and on and at the end you think to yourself, "what did they just say?" A lot of the artist statements I have read in CM have really turned me off. Please be clear, concise and to the point. I would like to know who you are, something interesting about your work, and why you chose the path you chose. I would rather see someone write what is true about themselves instead of trying to impress us with flowery speeches. On the other hand, it could be partly my fault as well that I can't get through these, my attention span is as short as an ants.I haven't really enjoyed the last year's issues of CM and dropped my subscription, but I bought this one just for the cover photo, I too was in Victoria's workshop at Arrowmont and I loved her presentations. It's interesting to read other points of view about this topic, that's what I love about these bloggers! So thought provoking some days :)

Scott Smith said...

Even Jack Handy would agree that was deep.