judging

I was one of four judges for a plein air competition (part of the Escalante Canyons Art Festival) today, and had the challenging but exhilarating job of evaluating other artists' work. The quartet worked well together, at a professional level, and I was proud to be part of the team. It was also an educational experience, since we had to verbalize the criteria we were using and then apply them. Put simply, we looked for basics (composition and rendition, as in use of color, value, brushwork, perspective, etc.) and also for a certain "plein air" quality, of freshness, I suppose, among other things.  At the end, we looked also for a more enigmatic quality, perhaps a uniqueness, a daring, a clear message. Something that made the work stand out beyond just good execution.  We worked hard, and it wasn't easy.  But we all felt rewarded by our efforts. In addition, for me, it was a good reminder that I need to apply some such criteria in evaluating my own work. Probably not perspective!  But certainly color, value, composition, brushwork, edges, etc., etc., etc.  This is one of those lists that lives in my head, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, but it would be useful to drag it out with more salience than I usually do, and use it to try to look at my pieces objectively.

In a conversation with one of the other judges, who had questions about my own work, I also was reminded of one of my basic touchstones: Paint from something real.  This goes back to the summer that I studied with David Dornan up in Helper, UT.  After a winter of "going abstract", I presented him my work at the beginning of my stay, and his immediate reaction was that the paintings lacked a groundedness, that they came out of my head and went nowhere.  Paint something real, he said, meaning that even if I paint in a nonrepresentational manner, I need to ground myself in reality.  For me, this is entirely true, though I acknowledge that it wouldn't necessarily be so for someone else.  This has become one of my mantras, and especially when I lose the thread, or the momentum, this is one of the tenets to which I return.  I don't know why I don't keep it in my head at a consistently conscious level.

What did I do that summer?  I painted bricks, or rather, I created paintings of bricks. Still life's of bricks. Abstracts of bricks.  Studies of light on bricks.  The bricks provided a reality, and I learned what it meant to "paint from something real."  A representational example from that summer is shown above.