Rejection!

The e-mail came. 850 submissions. 225 acceptances. Kelp was not accepted. I am patting myself on the back for having the courage to submit a quilt, an art quilt. I had made a commitment to myself to finish it in time. I got that done. I brought it in to the Bedford Gallery (although I needed to ask my friend Susan to go with me!).

I just returned from picking up the quilt and had an interesting experience. Another woman, my age, arrived at the same time as me. She mentioned that she had received an e-mail that she hadn’t wanted to receive. She expressed many of the same feelings as I was having. This was her first time submitting work for an exhibition. She was disappointed–she had convinced herself that her work would be accepted. When they returned my quilt, the woman asked to see it and told me that she liked it!

Susan and I plan to go to the exhibit to see what was accepted. The question now is, why didn’t the juror select this piece? My friend Candice also submitted two quilts, neither of which were accepted. I still like what I did. I’m wondering about making it larger, suitable for my guild show.

I Can't Believe It

Kelp

I entered a quilt in a juried mixed-media show. My friend Susan told me about this show, Local Voices: Defining Community Through Art, at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. This is the part I of the brochure that I liked: a dialog between community and visual artists who live in Contra Costa County, emerging artists...

So the deal was that today and yesterday they were accepting submissions (no photos, no slides–the actual works); they will be juried tomorrow; an email will be sent out on Friday. I brought in a new work that I’m calling Kelp. I finished it today. I took a poor quality picture of it but here it is. I was in a rush.

It is 12-1/2" by 31". I struggled with the picture: I must figure out how to photograph something that has high contrast.

I also struggled with finishing this. I had intended to do a "pillowcase" finish with no binding but I was afraid that all of the quilting had made it too stiff and I wouldn’t get a nice knife edge. On a prior piece I had used a very thin batt and hand quilted it. After squaring it up, I put a new "back" on and used Melody’s Escape Hatch method. On this one I bailed and put on an ever so skinny binding, so as to appear more arty than quilty. The other issue was that if I put another "back" on, the quilting would be covered and I really liked how the back looked.

And real artists don’t show the backs of the their work. Oh well...

And I almost forgot. Another major artist failure: When I was quilting it I forgot all about SIGNING THE FRONT. I left no room to sign it. Now they will know for sure that I am not an artist. I will have to continue to emerge...

But the major struggle was whether or not to offer it for sale. I think if I had finished it a week ago and had started on something new I wouldn’t have felt so attached to it. And I couldn’t come up with an amount. I felt very strongly that if I was a real artist, I would of course sell it. That’s what artists do, right?

Kelp: The back

Kelp back