big bad competitive feeling

Wow ! That's a great work, Fi !

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?

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.

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 ...

L'amour romantique et zébré ! C'est très bien fait et imaginé bravo Fiona.