Hand – Work

This time of year local art associations send out Annual Show notices to those on their email lists. I remember the ritual of deciding what to enter, getting it ready, and taking it on the receiving day to the designated place. It was fun to see friends working the tables, or bringing their own entries.

The second part of the ritual, which happened occasionally, was picking work up that was not chosen for the show. But this all changed when electronic entry became common.

Electronic entry makes things so easy to enter shows. You don’t have to haul things about. You can easily enter shows all over the country without shipping your work. No tags to fill in and secure to the back of the frame, no multiple copies of inventory lists.

Of course, you don’t get a peek at the competition as you drop off your work.

I used the electronic entry for several years with good success. But I noticed that something about the art shows changed. One year, at one local show more than fifty percent of the selected items were photography, and the remaining pieces were all the other mediums: oil, watercolor, pastel, drawing/graphics, 3-d, and sculptural.

Another year, photos in the newspaper of the Best of Show used the digital entry photo which appeared to be violet, but when I saw the item in the show it was a graphite drawing, and the frame gave it a whole different feeling.

 

And I found that my work was being

accepted less often, especially if I entered

one of my sculptural baskets like this:

So last year I didn’t enter anything in the local shows. But I did enter this basket in the California State Fair, where you still take the work to be seen by the judge. It was accepted and won a Second Place ribbon.

 

The last time one of the local groups had their annual show at Stockton’s Art Museum I didn’t enter, but I went to the opening. The judge selected the winners of prizes based on the digital entries. He never saw the actual work.

I remember trying to find something in the show that was outstanding. A piece that had that WOW factor. There was one piece that had me trying to figure out how it had been created, but over all I was not impressed with the show.

The group’s gallery director walked by and asked me how I liked the show, and I didn’t really have an answer. I said something like “I’m still looking.” As he hurried away, he said he thought it was the worst show they had ever put on. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment.

I think digital entry is a wonderful improvement over slides and hand-carry to enter your work, but I also think the actual work should be viewed when the awards are selected.

When I was at the art museum in Albuquerque last November, I saw a number of original works by artists in the 1960’s including Feininger, de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Seeing work by these artists in books had not left a positive impression on me. Standing right in front of them made all the difference in size and detail. I could see and understand why their work has been preserved.

 

 

 

 

Three years ago I went to an art demo at the local art league where we were shown how to make a shape or texture on a canvas board to give dimension to an abstract painting. So I came home and textured-up two canvas boards hoping to produce a piece for an annual show.

I did some painting on each one. On one of them, what I expected to be a lily of some sort, soon looked more like a starfish than a flower. I thought, okay I can do mixed media and add some small real shells to the piece. I also put in a second starfish embracing a scallop, which will be its dinner.

So I’m painting along and decide to add a few red beads, because the fresh-dead starfish I had found on my last shelling trip had raised red bumps on its arms. I also added some highlights with small pieces of foil that I had torn off a container I opened at breakfast.

I wanted to add some dark areas behind the big starfish so it would stand out. The texturing I had started with was covered with a coat of matt medium as the demo artist had done, saying that the acrylic medium would allow the paint to be removed for highlights. Every time I tried to add another layer of dark paint, the brush would instead pick up the layer I had just put on.

Frustrated with the process, I decided to try a stencil effect using a rubbery scrap of those things you put under rugs so they don’t slip and slide. It didn’t work so well as a stencil, because the rubber absorbed the paint. I liked the color so much I decided to adhere the rubber mesh to the painting with a clear gel medium.

Then, I wanted to add a few more red beads. They were in a narrow glass tube that had been my mother’s. The cork in the tube crumbled when I opened it the second time, and I found myself trying to separate the cork crumbs from the beads. After a few minutes, I thought, why am I standing here picking out the cork? Just throw it on with the beads—no one will even notice!

At some point in all the above, I had actually looked at the starfish and counted the arms. Seven. The starfish I collected in the Bahamas has five arms. Was there such a thing as a seven-armed starfish? Google informed me there was. It is called Luidia ciliaris, it lives in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, and it is red.

The painting didn’t get accepted in the show I entered. I never got around to working on the second textured board. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get around to doing something with that this year.