“Zoe and My Birthday
Anniversary”
Early this morning, November 20, 2009, as I lay in my bed, before getting up to make coffee, I was thinking about my life and all the things that I am thankful for on this thirty-sixth anniversary of my thirty-ninth birthday. I tried to remember all of the people that I have known in my life that did not get the opportunity to live as long as I have. I thought about what I am doing with my life.
As most of you may know, since I looked at those old sketch books of my drawings from the early 1970s in August of 2006, I decided to see if I could be an artist again. Since then, I have been traveling down that rocky road of trying to teach my hand to do drawings and paintings that people will enjoy looking at.
This watercolor painting of Zoe exemplifies so much of my effort to try to be an artist again. I have struggled with this painting. There are parts of it that tell me that I have made progress and there are parts of it that tell me that I still have a lot to learn. About a month ago, I sent out the image of this painting to all of you when I was wondering whether or not to add more color to her chest area or leave the painting as is. About half the comments from all of you said leave it alone and the other half said it needed more work. I decided it needed more work. This image is of the finished painting.
The subject matter of this painting is of a Florida panther named Zoe that lives at PrideRock Wildlife Refuge near Terrell, Texas. This painting of Zoe kind of combines my experience doing pen and ink drawings, my experience doing watercolor paintings, the wonderful people I have met such as Carol and Gary Holliman (the owners of PrideRock Wildlife Refuge), the animals that I now know, and who I am as a wannabe artist.
I am painfully aware that wildlife art is not in vogue at the present time as it was about twenty-five to thirty years ago. So, I wonder if I should change the subject matter of my paintings to something more “politically correct” and more popular in the art world today. What do you think I should do: keep on plugging at an unpopular subject matter or make the change?
A little over a year ago, I started making applications to the sponsors of various art festivals to have a booth in their art shows. The digital age has dramatically changed how those applications are made and how the applicants are chosen to be in most of the major art festivals. Artists are now generally required to submit four digital images of their art or craft work and a digital image of their booth displaying their art work through a company named ZAPP.
ZAPP sends those digital images to the art festival sponsors. Since there are usually many more applicants than booth spaces available, the sponsors try to be fair. So they invite jurors to select the best applicants for their festival. The jurors are not supposed to know who the applicants are. Recently two of these art festivals invited artists to view the applications they have received the day before the jurors do their voting to select the best applicants.
I have attended both of these pre-juror sessions. It has been extremely helpful to see what the competition looks like and to see how the jurors do their voting. Each applicant’s five images are projected onto a screen or wall for about six to seven seconds. The jurors are seated about fifteen to twenty feet from the applicant’s art images. The juror has approximately one second to evaluate each image and one to two seconds to vote.
They vote their opinion of the applicant’s images on a scale of 1 to 7. One being the lowest score and seven being the highest score and they cannot vote the neutral number four. Each applicant’s score is then averaged. The sponsor invites the applicants with the highest average scores to fill the number of available booth spaces. Generally there are two hundred to three hundred booth spaces available for one thousand to fifteen hundred applicants. So, only about one in five applicants will receive an invitation to be in the art festival. More often than not, I receive the condolence letter from the sponsor telling me that I was not invited to their art festival. And I agonize as to why.
On the other hand, I am beginning to have some recognition and I have recently won some awards. For the next month, I have to concentrate on getting my drawings, paintings and stories ready for my first big one-man show at the Carson County Square House Museum in Panhandle, Texas. The opening reception has been set for January 9, 2010. Of course, all of you are invited.
Cheers,
Acree
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