Today’s most recent work, and nearly finished:
Gardening Experiment, unfinished (and sideways). By Jennifer Broschinsky.
It’s that time of year again: the submission period is open for the state’s most prestigious juried show! I have submitted works to the Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art for the past three years, been accepted to two of them, and now I have to make a choice.
My group show at the Utah Arts Festival Gallery is coming up in May. I need to have twenty paintings ready for show. Right now, this moment, I have 13 paintings complete. (Three I’m not happy with, and would like to be able to replace with better works.) I have 5 in-progress paintings, one nearly complete as of today, which brings me to 18 works of the 20 I need for May.
I still have two months to create more work.
The Spring Salon is a big deal. I want to submit my best work to it – work that represents me well and displays my current skill.
I also want to fill my show at the Arts Festival Gallery with my best work. As a commercial venue, it is more likely to get sales.
And anything I submit to the Salon will not be available for the May show; it will be in Springville until July.
I DON’T LIKE HAVING TO MAKE THIS DECISION.
So I am putting on a business manager hat, and trying to think about this logically.
The Spring Salon is a show for showpieces. They want big, they want impressive. They take small works, too, but the ones that hit you the most have a lot of wow factor.
The gallery show would be a great place for small works. It’s a pretty small venue, anyway, with not a lot of wall space, and I will be sharing it with three other artists. The gallery liked that I had a range of sizes available, and so requested the full compliment of the 20 paintings I offered. Small pieces will have lower prices, and are more likely to fall in the range of impulse-buy, which is an advantage to me… and smaller works take less time for me to paint. I will be better able to create more small works than I am to be able to paint more large pieces.
So I’m thinking I may submit my largest piece, an 18â€x24â€, plus one other larger work, to the Salon… and use the next two months to make at least 4 more so I have 20 ready for the gallery. That way I can do both.
Conversation While Worried About Other Things, by Jennifer Broschinsky. (Bad photo; I need to take a better one!)
*sigh*
I suppose this is a good dilemma to have. I mean, it was possible that I could have not had enough paintings even to consider submitting them elsewhere…