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This year I will be the juror of awards for the annual Pastel 100 Competition (figures and portraits) sponsored by the Pastel Journal. I will also judge the OPA Western Regional Exhibition. I know that virtually everyone except for the top prizewinners will disagree with some or all of my selections. (I’ve never seen a show where I agreed with all the choices).  I’ve heard artists grumble, “ They never accept nudes” or “ they only like cowboys and Indians” or “they only pick their friends.” My experience is that most jurors don’t do any of those things and, in fact, take their job seriously.

I think most jurors don’t look for particular subject matter: 

• I look first for good drawing. If the right parts aren’t in the right place no amount of rendering will make it better. 

• Good design is probably number two…by that I mean an interesting distribution of light and dark masses and a dominant harmony.

• A solid value structure to create the illusion of three dimensionality

• A command of edge relationships

• “Meaning” – this is a subjective quality. But in the most interesting paintings the artist is trying to show us something unique about the subject. It’s not just a meticulous rendering of every detail.

The jurors of acceptance generally look at images on a computer.  They typically rank them on a five-point scale. There may be three or more jurors whose rankings are combined to arrive at the final acceptance list out of 2000 or more images. The top paintings are easy to identify – the 5’s. So are the 1’s and 2’s. The middle group requires three or four viewings. And often the cut-off point between an acceptance and rejection is very slight. The juror may spend ten hours or more judging the show.

A couple of points worth noting: your position in the viewing order can help or hurt you. And you can’t control that. For example, if I’ve just seen three killer portraits in a row, a fourth of slightly lesser quality may get rejected whereas if it were sandwiched among a group of landscapes it might have been chosen.  Secondly, derivative work is more likely to get cut. There is a noted still life artist who teaches a lot of workshops; his students tend to paint like the instructor. I have juried shows where there were literally over 100 paintings with the same gray-green background, the same types of objects on a horizontal shelf and the same treatment of light.  Many of them were well done, but you can’t have 100 clones in a show. 

Selecting the winners also involves a ranking process.  Usually a few paintings jump to the top but deciding on the exact order of awards can be challenging. I generally go through the show five or six times before I reach my final decision.

Here are a few good ideas:

1. Take good photos of your artwork. I have a photography area in my basement with color-corrected lights on each side.  I shoot with a white balance preset for that light (see your camera’s manual) and use a polarizing filter to get rid of glare. Square up the images and crop them in Photoshop so only the painting shows.

2. Calibrate your monitor. There are several programs to do this; I use Colorvision’s Spyder. That way the image you see on your screen will actually look like the file does. 

3. Ask someone you trust to help you select which images to enter. They may be more objective.

4. If you get in or win an award, be happy…but don’t take it too seriously. If you get rejected, don’t take it personally. The noted portrait artist Everett Raymond Kinstler told a story about the painting above his mantle. On one side was the letter of rejection from the National Academy; on the other side was a second letter also from the National Academy dated one year later announcing that the same painting had won Best of Show. I’ve had a similar experience with “Red Brigade” (below) rejected in one show, awarded Best of Show in Another.