Rejection: Part 2

Yesterday I drove to the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) to pick up the 2 paintings that I had rejected from a juried competition. Fred, who is one of the main volunteers for this competition, was there behind the check-in desk. He sat there shaking his head saying, “I don’t get it.” Fred liked the 2 paintings and so did anyone else who saw them, with one exception, the judge. Fred and I visited for a bit and discussed juried competitions. Fred also had both of the pieces that he entered rejected. Fred does these beautiful wooden bowls that are turned on a lathe and the top rim has the natural edge of the wood. He also does printmaking. They are simple and stunning.


As I’ve always known, competitions are a crapshoot. Who knows, maybe that day the judge only wanted pieces with analogous colors, or works done on paper, or whatever mood he might have been in that day. The day was beautiful and sunny so I enjoyed the drive. I forgot my camera so I wasn’t able to get a couple of reference shots of a barn for my image file. Once I got home, I photographed the paintings and made the necessary color corrections. Tomorrow I will email the jpegs to 3 galleries that handle my work

Early afternoon I worked on making modifications to the display panels I’ve previously built for doing art fairs. I need to make 4 more half-width panels to help add stability to the display when everything is set up. I’m becoming as bad as an engineer friend of mine with my tinkering and fine-tuning. I spent the rest of the day preparing paper and some small panels for new work, mostly studies. After laying out the drawings for 4 more pieces I started work on a small (10” X 12.5”) color study using oil and oil pastels and ended up finishing it.


Today I’ll glue some small paintings on paper down to panels and get them ready to frame (I sealed the panels yesterday). I’ve got 5 of those then I’ll work on the next color study. Maybe it’ll be another alla prima day. I’ve also posted another close-up of another molding I started making. It’s so easy it’s almost sinful. I took a piece of glass beading (this is trim that is used to hold glass window panes into the window frame) put some glue on it and tacked it down with my brad gun. Cut the miters, glue it and paint it. Done!

The 2 paintings are both oil on panel. The hilly landscape that is viewed from above looking down is from my Emmaus Road Series. It measures 24” X 48”. Playing off influence from Wolf Kahn, the other is titled Red Glow (for obvious reasons) and measures 30” X 48”. Both paintings were done this year.