The Juror, the artist, the man

When I created this self portrait with the red sweater back in 1986 it was for a very special occasion. A favorite artist of mine was the juror for an upcoming national art show being sponsored by a gallery in Soho. I was so excited because I really loved Mr. B's art. I related to it, I got it, I aspired to paint like him. So I studied his self portraits in particular and began working on this pastel. It's small because the maximum size for this show was 11 x 14", the palette, I kept it saturated with warm hues, working in 'contrast of intensity' which is both his and my natural way of working. I paid particular attention to the shadows in my face because it seemed to be an attention to detail in his portraits. I gave myself a challenge to draw my right hand into the portrait, while using my right hand to draw! The end result was, I got into the show. I was told the entries were close to 5000, but that is just hearsay. The accepted pieces numbered 65. And mine was one of them. I was so encouraged by that but didn't quite know what it would mean to me until later. When I arrived at the opening I was speaking to a nice gentleman who told me he was with Mr. B when he was going through the slides of the submitted work. When he came to my self portrait he paused and said "I think I know this woman." Anyway, could he have been subconsciously drawn to the portrait because his own work had influenced me? Did I look 'familiar' because of it? These were questions I asked myself as I looked around at the other work he had chosen for the show. I was certain that I got in through some kind of fluke or default of the juror. My self criticizing mind was going full steam. But in the end I was able to add the national show to my resume and it sure looked good there.

Fast Forward to 2010. I have joined Facebook. I found so many people I used to know back in the 60's and 70's. This is a great thing isn't it? To be able to reconnect with old friends that disappeared years ago from my life and also meet total strangers and invite them onto my page?

One day I was looking at a page on Facebook of the National Portrait Society and happened to see that Mr. B was there. When I clicked on his picture I noticed that I had a few friends in common with him. I did a triple flip, grabbed my heart and sent him a message to let him know how much he had influenced me in my life. He responded right back and wrote me a brief but very nice note sharing with me his excitement about an upcoming event. In closing he asked to see samples of my work. So I very nervously spent a few hours selecting and then rejecting and then selecting a half dozen or so pieces that I hoped were good enough to share with someone of his notoriety and sent them off holding my breath. Surely he would write back and tell me I needed to spend a lot more time at my easel or else he would say, are you sure I juried you into a show? But, the truth is, I never heard back from him.

It's possible he didn't get the email because I had half a dozen images in it. And maybe Mr. B thinks I never wrote back to HIM. I kept telling myself to send a follow up email, ask him if he received my images and I did nothing. But whatever happened, I feel so sure that he did see them and just didn't care to comment. In the meantime I sent him a friend request on Facebook which he did not respond to either. Rejected twice by the grand master of figurative realism. Oh well. Life is short, when one door closes a window opens and vice versa. I was trying to comfort myself with all the right sayings but I was convinced that he had just chosen to ignore me because my work was not at a level worthy of noticing. I was really looking down on myself and making sure I did not look up. Suddenly I wasn't feeling so hot and Facebook wasn't any fun any more.

Months had passed, time healed all wounds and honestly I had forgotten about all that when, a few days ago, I sent out a mass email to all my friends, family and clients. I was announcing a new web page that I was excited about because I was now selling prints and cards of my most salable images. To my dismay I did not receive any feed back until a few days had passed and then there appeared in my inbox two new messages. One was from a good friend congratulating me on my new site and another was from him, the artist. I was so nervous to open the email because I didn't expect to hear from him and even forgot he was in my address book. When I did finally get the nerve to open it, here is what it said: "Please remove me from your mailing list."

It has now been 3 days since that email request and I have to say that I feel a little bruised inside and like a changed person. There is a quiet feeling inside and light that has gone out of my delusional candle. I know now that in the grand scheme of things, I am nobody, a person that needs to get a day job, someone who has been fooling herself for more than half a century thinking she can draw or paint better than the average artist and will someday be great. Don't get me wrong, I can make an image look like what it represents and I have fans out there that tell me daily that they love my work, I have also sold hundreds of images of my own work most of my life, but that is not enough. I have had to own up to the truth of what I have always known underneath, there is no real purpose yet, there is no deep or challenging concept, nothing to compel someone to think very hard, nothing new to contribute to the art world, in any of my images. The conceptual part of the art, the creative bones, the rending of my own flesh and turning it into paint has up until now been missing from my work.

So now I need to thank you Mr. B for the cold slap on the back of the head, figuratively speaking. You have put me in my place and forced me to face reality, disappear inside myself, find my own heart and then fight my way back up out of the darkness with a new resolve to begin my life over as a better artist. I feel like the little girl in the black and white painting who has just received her first pair of skates and is about to prove to the world that she doesn't need feet to fly down the road on silver wheels. I am that little girl and I did that over and over when I was a child. I can do it again, now, I can, I can.