“Artists shouldn’t enter the arena of competitions until they are tough enough to realize it is only opinion and not a reflection on their worth.” (Mary Moquin)
So… I got a rejection letter. None of the pieces I submitted were accepted, although I’ve been in that particular exhibit twice in years past ( most recently about three years ago).
The above is one I submitted. Problem is with form letters, you never know what it was that made them reject it. I’ll only be able to speculate when I go to the exhibit.
I’ve noted before that they seem partial to some 3-D element for the prize winners, but I haven’t tried that yet. There are a lot of ways that could be done with my work, but without my work by nature being 3-D, I suspect it would look contrived. I also get frustrated when I get too far away from the actual drawing (like those pendants, where the glass cutting and soldering is time-consuming). Cutting paper, layering paper, rotating layers of paper, mirror-edges around the design–all of them sound cool but don’t really sound fun to put together. I’m really not a paper-crafter.
I have a couple of other ideas about how I can give them more depth, so I suppose I’ll concentrate on that first.
I have a couple of little peeves about these exhibits. The first is the application fee (in this case, $25, which isn’t too unreasonable). The second is that photography and other kinds of art work are usually grouped together, and I think photography exhibits/competitions should be held separately from other media. I think photography is an entirely different beast, especially now that good cameras are affordable and it’s so easy to use the computer in conjunction with that. I love it, but just because it hangs on the wall doesn’t make it the same thing.
Evaluating my work is a constant process, always there in the background, but it’s good to put it up front sometimes. Right now the difficulty of getting exposure to promote sales makes it a challenge in ways that don’t have anything to do with the difficulty of doing the work. I hope I’ll be able to draw some honest conclusions later on. Maybe that will include submitting some photographs next time.
There’s one nice little conclusion to this form-letter rejection, though. I was shelf-reading at work last night (shelf-reading is checking the shelves to make sure that every book is placed in exact order). I always keep an eye out for bookmarks since I have quite a collection. Usually I find check-out receipts and boarding passes. This time, in a book called “The Lord is my Shepherd”, I found $26.00. Just enough to cover the application fee and postage to send the cd. Is that cool, or what?
Jeanne
So Far From Heaven 