Megan Caldwell Chandler

I’m excited to report that I’ve had another successful event!  My piece, Blue Hole, was accepted into the Richmond Art Museum’s 115^th Annual Exhibition!  Having a piece accepted is especially sweet for me because I’ve had this exhibit on my list of goals for the last five years, and I’ve had my work rejected here before.  I’m excited to attend the reception in a few weeks and view the selection of works.

 Last night I attended this show’s open judging, and I’m glad I went.  It was a learning experience.  This is only my second open judging, so my sample set is quite small.  From my (albeit limited) perspective, last night’s judging was a bit of a bust.  I want to start out by clarifying that I do not begrudge the juror’s choices.  I think the work that was selected is high quality and professionally done.  However, I would have liked to hear the juror speak about some of the selected and rejected pieces, which he did not do.  There was too much work for the juror to speak about each piece individually, but I wish he had talked at least a little bit about the art.  This juror did speak some, but he only talked about secondary things concerning the artworks.  For example, he spoke at length about all things framing, i.e. matting choices, frame choices, and glass choices.  He also talked a lot about selling art.  He made comments about painting on canvas instead of paper because it sells so much better.  He talked about how he prefers artists sign their work, including signature placement, print style, color, etc.  He basically talked about everything but The Art, and that was a total bummer.

 It’s not that I think framing, signing, and selling are unimportant considerations.  The issue is that these things are not The Art, and I want to know more about The Art.  The things the juror focused on were, to quote my favorite movie, “incidental and not integral.”

 I don’t have much in the way of new work this week, but I can show you a few pages from a new book I’m working on.