I have always had a funny relationship with Juried Shows. They are a great way for an artist at my level to get work hung and seen. But they are also not always the best way to get one’s work out in the world and sometimes I feel like it is a risk because how something is hung can either make it shine or diminish it.
There was a period many years ago when I was creating work that was consistently getting accepted into shows and then one day I attended a show I was in and said to myself “This is NOT the art I want to be making.” Around that same time, I had one of the best paintings I ever created, an angry self portrait of myself, rejected from a show. I gave the painting to my father because he was why I was angry. My parents loved the painting. They did not see the anger but they definitely saw me in the painting. It has hung prominently in their living room for years. My mother used to always relay to me how visitors would praise it. In a highly unusual moment it was relayed to me by somebody who helped coordinate the show that the juror loved the painting but just could not fit it in to the show she was creating. This is highly unusual as most times one never hears why a piece is rejected.
It is hard because the work I want to make or the work I get excited about is not always the work that makes the cut for a Juried show. I have had almost no luck getting the drawings I have made about Gaza hung and it makes me sad because those drawings are in my opinion some of my most personal and emotional pieces of art. I do not feel that the drawings are specifically political because they represent the heartbreak which everyone is experiencing as a result of the conflict.
Last summer I went and did some Gelli Prints with my artist friend at her house. Towards the end of our time working I used already squeezed out paint and using the motifs I had been exploring in my drawings of the Keffiyah’s and Tallit’s I whipped off some mono prints to capture the essence of my drawings. And those prints are not only well liked by those who see them, and seem less “uncomfortable” but they also both just got “accepted”. One was shortlisted for London’s Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and the other was accepted into Marblehead’s “Variations Show”. I like these prints but they do not feel like my “babies” the way the other work does.
Another Gelli Plate Print which I created with the large Gelli Plate my son and daughter-in-law gave me for my birthday was also shortlisted. But I love that print and it will be hard to send it off to London.
This time around I learned my lesson. I am sending unframed work to our friend’s in Surrey. Killian will frame it for me and Joanne will deliver it. Now if I can only manage to figure out the INSANE VAT registration. They seem to have updated the web site so it is a bit easier to use this year. So fingers crossed it doesn’t take forever. Last time even with Joanna visiting and helping us we spent a long time just trying to get documents uploaded. At least we laughed a lot about it.
And separately I took a photograph while visiting our son in NH of the remaining ice on the river. I love the photograph and had an idea about making a Gelli Plate print influenced by it. I created it on Wednesday and was very pleased with how it came out. What do you think?
