Fi Webster

Fi Webster club

Posted: 19 May 2018


Taken: 19 May 2018

10 favorites     6 comments    372 visits

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big bad competitive feeling

big bad competitive feeling
Cut-paper collage inspired by my musing on the subject of competition.

I like this technique: putting foreground pieces together with background mortar between them, like what masons do in making a stone fireplace. But sorry, friends... I'm not very good at it. I need more practice.

The piece in the upper right corner is from a painting by Francis Picabia. Picabia was a key player in the Dada movement, both in Paris and in New York. He had a lot of money, which he used generously--e.g., printing lots of Dada publications.

If you're into Dada, I have a book to recommend: Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century by Jed Rasula. The hardcover price (at Amazon) has plunged to under ten dollars, which gives me the impression it's not going to be in print very long. So act fast! I give it five stars!

Spo, Petar Bojić, buonacoppi, xenophora and 6 other people have particularly liked this photo


6 comments - The latest ones
 Ulrich John
Ulrich John club
Wow ! That's a great work, Fi !
5 years ago.
 Fi Webster
Fi Webster club
Thanks, y'all! What about you? Are you ever competitive?

Françoise: Et toi? Est-ce que tu es jamais competitive?

German folks: Wie steht's bei euch? Seid ihr jemals wetteifernd?
5 years ago. Edited 5 years ago.
 Fi Webster
Fi Webster club
Hee's another English word for that feeling, that mindset, what this collage is about: one-upmanship.

We're all artists here. We can speak frankly. Have you ever had the feeling? Do you find it embarrassing?

I do. I feel it, and I'm embarrassed by it. I think that's why, in my zebra collage, I built stone walls around it.
5 years ago. Edited 5 years ago.
 Tim Lukeman
Tim Lukeman club
I have very mixed feelings about competition. There can be a healthy sort of competition, in that the fine work by someone else inspires/pushes us to do better work ourselves ... the sort that isn't driven by a desire or need to destroy or dismiss the other work in order to buildup one's own, but to try & match its power or insight with an equivalent power & in sight of one's own ... I think of John & Paul, or the Beatles & the Beach Boys, first being amazed by some new work by the other & then thinking, "OK, time to REALLY rev up the energy & CREATE!"

This is more competition for the sake of the work, primarily, rather than for the bruised & insecure ego. When driven by the latter, though, competition is horribly destructive, it seems to me, and any "success" is invariably tainted & finally empty ... as empty as the person? Maybe. Or maybe that's the idealist in me. :)

I've been lucky enough to have a couple of pieces selected for local juried art shows in the past, even to have a couple win a small prize with a few others. Of course it felt very good indeed! But I don't recall feeling angry or cheated because someone else took first place, because I could see how good their work was. And I didn't feel as if it made my work any less good, which I now see was quite sensible of me.

Robert Bly once spoke about the sweetness of the yearning for something unreachable. He was speaking with Bill Moyers & talked about yearning to be as great a poet as Shakespeare, while knowing that he never would or could be ... and yet the yearning was sweet to him, not bitter, and it actually enabled him to create better work of his own, better than he might have thought possible for himself in the past. This, I understand ...
5 years ago.
 Léopold
Léopold club
L'amour romantique et zébré ! C'est très bien fait et imaginé bravo Fiona.
5 years ago.
 xenophora
xenophora club
I didn't think of mortar when I first saw it. Boiling water, perhaps? (Uh, I do a lot cooking.)

I just dumped my Amazon account last month, but maybe the library will come to my rescue.
5 years ago.

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