Missing the target

   A while ago American Craft magazine had an article about the artist Wendell Castle, and it included a list of his artist rules to live by.  One that struck me particularly was " If you're hitting bullseyes every time, the target's too close."  

   Recently, I've been trying to produce some pieces with some more drama and impact to them.  One way to do that is with size.  I did a post about that not too long ago, comparing 2 oxidized silver and stone pieces with a sawtoothed edge. There I felt that by making the sawtooths considerably bigger I had produced a more interesting necklace.  I've been trying to do that with another concept.  Back when I was working mostly with seed beads I did a series of pieces I called "links".  Each necklace was composed of a series of open trapezoid shapes with a stem and toggle on one end, so that each could be joined to the next.  First I did plain links, and then I started to embellish them.

You could add or subtract links to change a necklace.  I really liked that series, and I've wondered about making links out of oxidized silver tubes.  They would necessarily be a lot bigger.  I've worked on that idea for past few weeks, but haven't been able to make it work.  Here's my final version.

I've tried all sorts of variations-- embellishing the bottom link, adding the stone link, making one of the links (the 1 at 11 o'clock) a more rectangular shape, and many others that I took apart and did over.  It actually doesn't look bad laid out flat like this, but on the body it just isn't great.  Also the toggles tend to fall out of the ovals too easily, making the necklace come apart.  I think one of the reasons for doing this post is that gives me a record of what I did, so that if I want to revisit the idea, I'll know what didn't work.  Now I'll probably take apart the stem and toggle on each link, and see if I can do something interesting with the open ovals.