KWS National
Exhibition 2010
November 19, 2010
~ January 2, 2011

Deadline for Entries:
August 2, 2010

Juror:
Janet Walsh

2010 Prospectus:
downloadable pdf

or send SASE to
Kansas Watercolor Society
Wichita Center for the Arts
9112 E. Central
Wichita, KS 67206

Two of my responsibilities for KWS I really loved, and one of them I hated. The ones I loved were sending out acceptance notices for the annual juried competition and writing checks to the award winners. The one I hated was sending out the rejection notices for the juried competition.

Every year, when the slides came in, I got to look at them as I recorded the vital statistics that were necessary to the final exhibition list. Because I did this for thirteen years, I feel like I know those of you who are regular participants in the competition, even if I haven’t met you in person. I not only recognize your names, but some of you I can identify by your work. I regularly had thoughts like “so-and-so has a nice painting this year”, and made my own mental choices of the pieces that the juror would select based on the whole batch of entries. The fact is, in the whole thirteen years I did this I have never been completely right. The jurors NEVER choose all the paintings I would have chosen for the show and every year I had to send out the notification cards that say “declined” to artists whose work I have admired. I also had to send out “declined” notices to artists that have entered the show many times and haven’t been accepted and I would like to be able to offer encouragement to them instead of the discouragement that a rejection notice brings. All of this has made me ponder the issue of “acceptance” versus “rejection” in art competitions and I would like to share some observations:

The first, foremost, most-important thing is SUBMIT A GOOD REPRESENTATION of your work, whether a slide or digital image. (See Ed Pointer's article about Photographing Your Artwork). Remember—the juror has only your slide from which to judge your work.

There is a certain amount of luck involved in any competition.
For instance, for some reason certain painting subjects seem to appear each year in larger quantities than other subjects. One year we had seventeen paintings of sunflowers entered. Obviously no judge is going to put seventeen different paintings of sunflowers in one show unless it is an exhibit of sunflower paintings. So, that particular year it was probably a little more difficult for a painting that featured sunflowers to be accepted than it would have been for a painting of some other subject. This phenomenon, however, isn’t anything you can plan for. You have no way of knowing what other artists are entering in the shows you enter. The only solution to the "sunflower problem" is to have the very best painting of a sunflower of all the others that are entered—unless, of course, it turns out that the judge hates all sunflowers and won’t put any picture of a sunflower in, no matter what. (Fortunately, our judges are usually more open-minded than that!)

A rejection of your painting is not a rejection of you as an artist. 
If a judge doesn’t like your painting one year, it doesn’t mean that you should throw that painting out or quit painting altogether. KWS always tries to find jurors who are experts in the field of watercolor, but they are still human, with emotional responses as well as objective criteria. I have seen a work entered one year and not selected as part of the exhibition. The next year the artist entered the same work and not only did it get accepted into the show, but it won an award. Go figure.

It is probably a mistake to try to paint something FOR the judge.
Paint for yourself and if the judge doesn’t like it, at least you will.

If you don’t enter a show, it’s a 100% certainty you won’t get in.
The only way to get accepted into juried competitions is to enter them—don’t let fear of rejection get in the way.  It has been really fun to watch the work of some artists change as they gain more experience.  Over and over I have seen artists enter, get rejected, keep trying, finally get accepted, and then go on to winning awards.

Find someone you respect and ask for his/her opinion about your work.
You don't have to agree with it, but listen.  Come to the Juror’s Day critique at the Wichita Center for the Arts and find out how the judge's decisions were made. Then start painting for 2009!

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