So I’ve finished up judging the initial round of entries into the Parklane Gallery show (Kirkland, WA) and I wanted to share with you all the notes I took while jurying (I also asked that these notes be sent to all entrants). By the way, it took me a number of hours spread over several days, and sleeping on my decisions between times, to finalize my choices.
The diversity of styles and subject matter - including some very original treatments of subjects not commonly seen in animal art - made jurying this show an enlightening and gratifying experience. I was delighted by the boldness many artists showed in their choices of colors and motifs. By the way, dogs, cats, horses, and roosters were heavily represented in the submissions, for some reason.
If your work did not make it in, please consider the following:
Photography of your work - A few of the images submitted were very small, making it difficult for me to evaluate the works thoroughly. Other pieces were represented by photographs (murky, skewed in the frame, blurry, or with extraneous background) which showed the work poorly. It is important to make sure that your values and colors are represented accurately, especially if you have large white areas in your work - unless you shoot with manual exposure, your camera can make these gray.
Quality - some of the work was not yet mature enough for exhibition; when evaluating your own art, take care to compare it to strong work by top artists. More generally, pieces really had to stand out in some way to be included, and all the elements in the piece had to work together and be of the highest quality, because there was plenty of very good art submitted. There were some interesting, original ideas that didn’t get in, and frequently it was because of a little weakness in drawing or values. In addition, there were paintings that had some good things going for them, but aspects of the pieces (often settings or backgrounds) needed to be treated with the same care as the main subject(s).
Quantity - I juried the show ‘blind’, so the images were simply numbered (not named). There were many artists who submitted more than one piece, which was clear from their style, and I would very much like to have included several of their works. However, since I could only choose 40 (I compromised at 41) pieces for the show, I was forced to make some extremely difficult choices. The organizers also specified that each artist could be represented by only one work.
Originality - there were many pieces that were solid works of art, and I hated to exclude them. But the work that got in not only met the foundation criteria for any good work of art (I discuss these elements in my workshops), it stood out in some way - usually by exhibiting an originality in some aspect that was appealing, striking, humorous, or thought-provoking.
A special note on the more abstract and experimental pieces: I enjoy and study abstraction, and it shows up in my own paintings. In the absence of good drawing - which abstraction often stylizes or abandons - the composition and values must compensate and be quite strong. Alternatively, some of the experimental work was highly original and appealing, but showed a little weakness in drawing or composition.
I cannot emphasize enough that there were MANY fine pieces that could not be included due to space limitations, and I agonized at great length over my decisions. Thank you to the artists for submitting such interesting work, and to Parklane for giving me the honor of judging this show.
Entries (RSS)
September 17th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Hi Julie, I’ve been a “silent blogwatcher” of yours for awhile which actually led me to enter the Parklane show (fairly local for me) I want to thank you for sharing your thoughtful and enlightening process of selection. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to thank you in person too.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I never cease to be surprised, with all the information that’s out there on how to do it right, that artists entering a juried show can’t/won’t take the time to either photograph their work properly or get someone else to do it. It does make the judge’s job easier though. The ones with part of the the family cat or the backyard fence or whatever are easy to eliminate.
I remember Paco Young at Beartooth doing a tutorial on how to prepare slides for show entries. Ack. Silver tape, new plastic slide holders, much patience.
So glad all the shows I enter have now gone to at least CD entries, if not digital uploads to someone like Juried Art Services (JAS).
California Art Club just took the plunge. They were the last, of the shows I enter, to require slides. I sent them a polite email late last year to let them know that I would not be entering any more of their shows until they at least accepted CDs. They now use JAS, too.
I really like your judging comments. “Not yet mature enough….” is great. But, of course, we know it’s really all subjective ;0).
September 19th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Your jury process was thoughtful, maybe you should offer your unique eye to the 50th Annual Society of Animal Artists jury pool.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Robin - thank you for the kind words, and I’m glad my blog led you to the Parklane show!
Susan, I agree…it can be disheartening to see a digital image which I know does not represent the work fairly, yet I cannot make assumptions about how it *probably* looks in reality…because even the best digital image does not match up to reality. It was especially sad when I had asked the organizers to specify a minimum dpi and size (eg, 5×8 at 300 dpi) and some of the images were far below that. Or when something that probably had lots of white was represented by a gray image. As you note, we no longer have to deal with silver tape and all that (and I did LOTS of that, along with bracketing exposure, “back when”) - the tools available now let artists color- and value-correct their digital images, so it’s hard to excuse poor image submissions.
And Debbie, thank you for the compliment! but SAA has yet to ask me to do that, and it’s probably best - I mean, we’re talking the creme de la creme of animal artists (Bob Bateman, Jim Morgan, Ken Carlson…). I do wish the jurying were more transparent, though; SAA never says who the judges are, or what they’re jurying for.
September 20th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
“I do wish the jurying were more transparent, though; SAA never says who the judges are, or what they’re jurying for.”
As one of the two new members of the SAA Executive Board (we start our terms in January), I am very interested in hearing from both Associate and Signature Members about what their concerns, ideas, visions are for the SAA.
The SAA President, Diane Mason, looked me right in the eye at one point during the opening weekend festivities and said that she was there for the artists. She will welcome any input from members that will promote that priority and also feedback on any aspect of the SAA. Please take the time to write to her or me or both of us!
September 20th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Susan - good to know!! thank you for posting that here! I’ll need to give that some thought…
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:34 am
Good information.
I entered a couple landscape paintings in Arts for the parks back a few years ago and wished at the time that i had gotten some kind of feedback (other than “sorry, your painting was not selected. try again next year (and don’t forget to include that $50 entry fee), but I realize they got thousands of entries and that it was probably completely infeasible to give any kind of real individual feedback. But for smaller competitions, it might be.
I’d guess that in the latter case, it’s probably more important than ever to have good images cuz you you only have a few seconds to “impress” the judge and after about the 1000th painting (or maybe even 100th), they probably start to get a jaded and start thinking about heading off for a cold beer at the Cowboy Bar.
I do think it would be a good idea for contests to publish their judging criteria ahead of time though, even if the criteria are fairly general.
I think it’s great that the judging was blind (as with Arts for the parks). Don’t know if that was your call, Julie, but I think it’s the best way to do things, both from the standpoint of fairness and from the standpoint of quality of the work that gets chosen. Who the artist is (and their art resume’) really is pretty irrelevant.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:50 am
It was my request that the entries be numbered, not named. Even so, I could recognize some artists by style - and I wanted to ignore that as much as possible.
I couldn’t give individual feedback, mainly because the logistics of taking notes and passing them back through the organizers would be enormous - not to mention the DAYS of my time it would take to give the equivalent of free critiques to all entries! But it was my hope that this more general feedback would be at least somewhat useful.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Maybe you don’t know Julie, but I’d be curious just how they go about whitling down thousands of entries to a matter of the top 100″ in a context like arts for the parks.
Do they give each slide a rating (on a 1-10 scale, for example) in each of several categories (eg, technical merit, orginality, etc), add these up for an overall score and then rank the paintings based on scores?
That would be a logical way of doing it and probably the most objective (and easiest) from the standpoint of judging.
If that were the case, they could at least provide that information to the artist, along with information about where the artist’s painting ranked relative to others.
Combined with photos of the paintings that were selected as the top ones (as they provided in arts for the parks), such simple ranking information would be pretty useful to the artist.
No detailed “critiques” would really be needed.
If it were all done electronically, it would not really entail any extra work on the part of the judge(s), since it would be simply a matter of printing out the rankings and scores for each painting.
I know this opens things up for “auditing” a little but I think that’s a good thing.