Juried exhibitions - what's the point?

Exhibition on computer screens in Canadian transit stations seen daily by 1 million people

I used to think I couldn't afford to enter national juried art shows. Now I think I can't afford NOT to enter them. Partly, it's a resumé thing:  you need new entries on your resumé every year so you have to show somewhere. Partly, it's a way of building a reputation as an artist. And partly it's about critical acclaim. Artists aren't ranked like tennis players or medical students, but the exhibition system effectively ranks artists according to where they show their work.

Juried art shows are not all the same. They have different purposes and uses. They're not intrinsically good or bad, but each one is more or less useful to each artist. I think of them in grade levels:  A, B, C, D and F. Within each grade, a plus can be added for an important juror or a very prestigious location; a minus can be given for a not very prestigious juror or location.

F level shows are local, and are either unjuried or are judged by jurors with a purely local reputation. These shows don't accept shipped work, and many only accept entries in person, not by digital photo.

D level shows are local with regional jurors. Some of these accept shipped work and entries by digital photos.

C are regional with regional jurors. Accept shipped work; entries online or by digital photo.

B are national with national jurors. Accept shipped work; entries online or by digital photo.

A are the most elite national shows or international shows with national or international jurors. Accept shipped work; entries online or by digital photo.

All of these shows have their uses.  The D and F level shows are always worth entering if you want to support the venue, help with fundraising or build your local audience. The people running these shows usually care quite a lot about their organization and can be supportive of you if you're supportive of their organization. Many art associations have shows that are open only to its members. Check them out; join as many art organizations as you can afford.

The advice usually given to art students about to graduate is to start out at the bottom and work your way up, from local to national shows. I disagree. Try them all and find your level. Research the jurors. Research the venue. If you hate the work of a juror, he/she will probably hate yours. Don't submit your work unless you have a decent chance of acceptance. If the venue only exhibits contemporary art, don't submit traditional work; if a venue only exhibits representational work, don't submit abstract work, etc. Decide how much money you can spend every year on exhibiting and stick to that:  it will help you decide which shows to enter and which to skip.

New technology has made new types of shows possible that can be worth doing. Exhibitions on computer screens, private or public, can be legitimate and effective. They can expose your work to a larger audience than would be possible in most exhibitions.

Entering shows inevitably means not being accepted into at least one somewhere along the line. If your work is not accepted into a show, look at an exhibition catalog (check online) so you can see what the exhibition looked like.  It's very often illuminating.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving

Art should be illegal

Shells, red and white chalk

There are questions I will no longer take seriously and discussions I will no longer participate in: whether the Vietnam War was worth fighting; whether jazz is more creative than classical music; whether photography is Art, etc.  The first five thousand times were OK, and now I'm done.

Similarly, there are things I won't do. I don't mean things like "I won't drink shots of tequila on my birthday", I mean things I won't do as an artist. I don't do commercial art. I don't exhibit my work in festivals or fairs. I don't show my work in any show that includes "crafts". You have to draw the line somewhere.

If you added up all the artists who ever lived from the first cave drawings to the present, you would have fewer total artists from the past than there are artists alive today. You would think that with this current planetary glut of artists, we'd have tons of great art.  Statistically, we should.  There are more than ten times as many artists per capita today (2%*) than there were in the Italian Renaissance (<.05%*) But great art is not what's happening, as it did in the Renaissance.  What we have is a lot of advertising and a lot of people playing artist, but very few actually learning how to really draw, paint or sculpt. To do that, you have to pay your dues and learn your craft. And to do that, you have to give up stuff:  time, energy, money, preconceived ideas.  And that's hard.

My conclusion is that art should be illegal, punishable by arrest, imprisonment and fines. Two things would happen. First, the general public would buy more art if it's illegal. Look at Prohibition. And second, the people who really just want to play artist would stop wasting everyone's time and learn golf instead (they could still wear berets), and only those who are truly compelled to draw, paint and sculpt would still be practicing artists.

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*Percentages from Wikipedia and I have no idea if they're right.

Photographs and sculpture

Ugolino, Carpeaux

Photographing sculpture is challenging. It would seem to be simple, because hey, the sculpture is just sitting there. It's not going anywhere. But you have to be careful not to flatten the forms with too much light, while you also have to have enough light to see the details. You need good contrasts to make a good photo, but you need to accentuate the shapes and textures of the sculpture, not the photograph. Using a flash doesn't work.

The best light is always daylight, but direct sunlight outdoors on a bright day can be blinding on a white or light sculpture, washing out most of the detail. While bronzes with dark patinas photograph well outside, they also lose detail and texture in bright outdoor light. In both cases, direct sunlight overhead can produce unintended cast shadows that are disruptive. Spotlights can do the same thing and I've never liked the results of using spotlights for sculpture photos. Bright light bleaches out colors, forms and textures. The best light is diffused, soft light. I've had the best luck with putting small sculptures near a sunny window, with some large sheets of white foamcore reflecting light back onto the sculpture. For large sculptures, I take pictures outside very early in the morning, or on an overcast day.  I'm probably the only person taking pictures outside at 5 AM muttering, "Dammit!  The sun came out."

Many photographers are not good at photographing sculpture unless the sculpture is in a museum where the light is all set up and all the decisions have already been made for them. Even then, they blow the shots half the time by shooting from the wrong angles. Sculptures have good sides and bad sides, even Michelangelo's. You have to find the best angles and the good sides. And adding insult to injury, most photographers of sculpture don't credit the sculptor. It's infuriating! What arrogance!  What intellectual laziness! I doubt whether they'd like to have their photographs published without credits.

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Eye candy

Ceiling of chapel at Mayo Clinic

I have a grudge against photographers carrying on about their "art" and how much time it takes, what long hours they put in and so on. Oh, please. I'm a sculptor. It usually takes me more than a year to make a sculpture:  do the drawing, make the armature, create the sculpture, cast or fire it, mount and patinate it, and then finally, take photographs of it. The very final step, the photograph, is just a minute fraction of the effort of what it takes to make a sculpture, that entire year of work. And that's the same amount of work a photographer does - just that last bit - the minute, tiny bit of effort, the taking of the picture. I do respect the work of nature photographers who travel and camp out in adverse conditions to get those amazing photographs of charging elephants. I feel like they're doing something sort of comparable to what I'm doing in terms of commitment and time. But the snapshots? The sailboats and seagulls and roses and so on? No. That's eye candy and a two year old with a disposable camera could take the same picture.

In the '60's, I spent a couple of years concentrating on photography. I took my camera wherever I went, shot a bazillion photographs and I have the stack of Triex contact sheets to prove it. Ultimately, I got bored with photography. It felt like a dead end for me. I realized what I really wanted to do was to learn how to draw, paint, and sculpt, and that's what I did. So here's what I think about photography. With a few exceptions (Steichen, Adams, Weston, Lange) photographs are just eye candy. Pleasant, eye-catching, basically unsatisfying and probably not good for you. If you're actually visually hungry, there's nothing in a photograph to nourish or satisfy you. I can't look at a print of a photograph for even a few solid minutes, whereas I can look at a Rembrandt for years. In a Rembrandt, there are variations and gradations of tone, textures, colors, line, shapes, forms, lights and darks. In a photo, there's none of that. Photography has no substance for me. There's basically nothing to look at. I view photos the same way at dog looks at a mirror, interested at first and then "oh, that's not even real" and then annoyed. For me, there can be no comparison between a painting and a photograph - one is interesting and the other is inherently empty.

Every day, we all see hundreds of photos and videos. They're everywhere. Everybody takes photographs - with phones and iPads as well as with cameras. Our lives have turned into one big Kodak moment. Inevitably, there's a sameness about all these photos. How many pictures have you seen of fall foliage reflected in water? sailboats on a sunny day? flowers with butterflies? old barns?  Almost all of these photos look the same. In writing, if the same idea is expressed in exactly the same way in the same language over and over again, it becomes trite. That's what all these photos are:  trite images. They are trivializations reducing what was an authentic experience into something shallow and meaningless. Instead of enhancing our lives with real content, depth and meaning, they are dulling our senses with mind-numbing repetition.

Because a photograph can be assimilated in a fraction of a second, photography is a perfect fit with 21st century culture. Anything that takes significant time and actual thought to create or appreciate is totally out of fashion, but photos are ubiquitous, the cultural version of fast food.  I call it "Easy Art" or "Art Lite" - fast and easy to create, fast and easy to assimilate. Photos are ephemeral and temporary.  Since we see so many of them, they are as disposable and unmemorable as kleenex.  I think photos almost never make it into permanent storage part of our brains; they're like all the everyday trivia that is discarded immediately. I don't think this is good for us. We're bombarded with a constant visual overload of drivel that amounts to visual pollution, in which we see hundreds of images every day, but really look at none of them. Our brains are overstimulated and undernourished; our perceptions are warped by an avalanche of cultural garbage, a diet of candy.

I'm off to the library.  I'm not taking my camera.  

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Why even bother?

Study of Rodin sculpture

Sometimes I wonder what is the point of applying to elite shows, competitions, grants and solo shows.  My odds are not great.  I'm old.  I'm not cutting edge, startlingly innovative or snazzy.  My chances range from "a snowball's chance in in Hell" to "well, it is possible."  But you can't win if you don't enter, so I feel compelled to enter some of these things.  I spent a lot of years not entering anything and that's not the solution.  Now, I'm probably overdoing it in the opposite direction, but what the heck.  At this point in my life, I'm not worried about looking like an idiot.  I'm used to that, as well as feeling like a fool.  And there's no fool like an old fool.

One of the nice things about getting old but not quite past my expiration date is that I don't give a rat's ass about a lot of things I used to care quite a lot about.  (Not ending my sentences with prepositions is one.)  What possible difference can it make whether I wear yoga pants to the grocery store or not?  Does the lettuce care?  And why do I have to wash my car all the time?  It will rain.  What's important is that I pay the bills on time, get the trash out and there's some kind of dinner at our house every night.  In my opinion, the secret of happiness is lowering your standards to the point that you can live with yourself, but not so low that you're wallowing in some kind of mess.

On the other hand, there are times you have to go the whole nine yards.  When you're learning how to do whatever it is you want to do with your life is one of those times.  Going off the deep end is totally appropriate when you're mastering your art.  There's no other way to do it.  No pain, no gain; no guts, no glory.  Set the very highest standards and don't stop until you meet them.  If it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, then I became an expert at life drawing and life sculpture four decades ago, and presumably, haven't lost it completely yet.  I'm glad I did it then because I couldn't do it now.  That kind of arduous acquisition of knowledge and relentless hours of practicing every day is really only possible for those who are young and full of energy.  I made some terrible life choices after my excellent art school education, so I have to work harder now to accomplish everything that I can.  I can't let the bloopers of the past determine my future.  I have to take a few more shots.

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Michael Jordan

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Glazing sculptures

Trotting Horse, glaze test, 2014

Lately I've been experimenting with glazing my fired clay sculptures.  I've always left them unglazed, preferring the pure bisque look.  However, I finally decided to dive into the wonderful world of glazes.  Consequently, I've spent a lot of time completely baffled, trying to understand why this glaze did that, and that glaze did this. There's not always an answer to every question, either.  Or at least not right away.  Maybe that's why potters have that quizzical expressional on their faces all the time. Glazing sculpture is like a baking a cake in a kitchen with the lights off.  Might be good, might be bad; who knows?!

The photo above is almost what I want, but I'm not there, yet.  It's a glaze test on a relief that developed cracks because it got too thick - you can see a crack between the neck and the head and it also buckled near the top left edge.  So I decided to use it for a glaze test.

One year later:

Indestructible, glazed porcelain, 2015

Got it done.  "Indestructible" will be exhibited in three successive national juried exhibitions in New York, NY.  It will be at the Audubon Artists Annual Exhibition 2015 in October and November, and the American Artists Professional League Grand National Exhibition in November. Finally, it will be exhibited next at the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club Annual Exhibition in December.

On sculptures, I like a matte glaze that has a soft sheen to it, but not the hard, glassy look of gloss glazes. Glossy is usually pretty repellent on sculptures. I'm looking for an antique bronze kind of thing - green with brown, or brown with green.  When I'm reunited with my kiln next summer, we'll see what happens.  Maybe I need to go to Greece to figure this out.

A previous blog post in June 2015, "Anatomy, Leonardo, horses," describes the process of making this relief.

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