Overcoming Rejection

[Mary Miller]

I have taken the second step of a chaotic plan to become a working artist by uploading some of my work.  I welcome your comments, critiques and encouragement.  Doubt about my talent is nourished by the numerous juried exhibition rejections I have gotten.  How do you cope?  How do you find the right galleries to send your work?

[Mick Grochowski]

One thing is that you can't take it personal. My thinking on the juried show thing, is that you can compare it to drawing names from a hat, no way of knowing who gets in or why. Normally, the jurist must pick some and must reject even more. I read a story once of world renown painter, just starting out and not getting accepted into juried shows, so to test a theory he created what he thought was his worse work ever, naturally he was accepted. When he later asked the judge about it, he was told that he was so talented that it was virtually impossible for him to do bad art.

From my experience, I've not entered a whole lot of juried shows, have gotten into about 10% of them and of those, have gotten a couple best of shows. Does it make any sense? I think of it as buying a lottery ticket, you will never win if you don't play.

Personally, I'd like to see a system where a panel of judges are involved. Actually, have seen a few shows like that recently. An example below..

http://artdeadline.com/artman2/publish/a/Horizon.shtml

Their selection process involves a complex two-part system. This exhibit will be juried by an anonymous 5-9 member panel of professional and academic advisors with a broad range of expertise. The jury will then pass along their recommendations to the exhibit curator who will make the final selections from the jury-approved pool.

So good luck on upcoming shows