The other night, I was fortunate to have my application assessed in a mock jury by the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. Long story short, my application would have been rejected just under the cut off by an average score of the two jury members.

Seeing my work on a huge projector screen in front of 50 other Toronto artists made me want to cower and pretend like it was not my own. This was the first time I heard anyone else describe my art who had a proper art background – two established artists, one of them being an art professor.

Here were my takeaways.

What the artist statement should NOT say

The artist statement is not about all your works you ever created. It should exclude other areas of your work description that are not apparent from the body of work being submitted. Given my mental health works are to me in a separate stream from the works in the series I submitted, I would not raise it.

The artist statement should be written plainly

When we read about artists in museums, they are described in a flowery way that is incomprehensible. Anyone who had some language like this in their statement was called out on (including yours truly). One jury member had a clear “BS meter” and I was glad that they were brave enough to raise these concerns aloud.

The advice was to write the statement plainly. The jury pointed out the difference between art critiques and artists writing their own statements. Art critiques are meant to have that flowery language, but apparently the artist statement is not the place to do this. Apparently being mundane is good.

This reminds me of when I tried to emulate the writing style of a high school classmate as she had been praised so many times in her language ability. When I stopped doing this and assumed my own plain language voice, my writing became not only comprehensible but also better.

The artist statement can also be written in first person.

The artist statement clarifies ambiguity arising from the images

The jury would have questions raised from viewing the images. They would then go to the artist statement to see if there was more analysis or insight it would provide. For me, it was:

• Why were these locations done?
• Were they created while working outside (en plein air) or from a reference photo?

For others:

• Why were these words chosen (as a display in a collage)
• Who were the women being displayed in a series? What was the artist’s relationship with them?
• Where were the images taken from? (for a collage)
• How would they describe their approach to this style of drawing (portraits)

The first image should be your strongest

It was funny how the jury described that they would refer back to applications with short form summaries of the work: “Can we go back to the jewellery one with the dark rock in the middle?” I’m reminded of my short-form when house hunting: “The dog house” or “pizza oven house”.

The first image is viewed very quickly over and over again so it’s interesting to see how this created an image from the juror’s perspective.

Size techniques and scaling up or down

On my particular pieces, there were suggestions I’ve heard before. One mention was to vary my lines, though I hadn’t thought of doing that from a brushwork perspective. I could try using smaller brushes for my size of canvas.

I have actually considered this before, but I also have thought of making my works larger. I might try with a more delicate hand to brush work and practice making smaller lines, rather than going out to buy more brushes in my set.

This somewhat flies in the face of the issue of the ability to sell my works – the larger they are, the more expensive they would be. That said, with the high price of entry for this particular fair, it almost seems like it would be necessary so that I could recoup the costs.

Artistic vision is important but is in tension with variety

Almost every application that was assessed had been rejected but in one of them, it was clear that there was a message to be told in the works presented. The distinction was very clear between the applications.

I am grappling with producing variety and marketability (providing more options to everyone who might purchase my art because they like the subject matter) vs gambling with a narrow series of works.

I might be making a false dichotomy though. It might be possible that when I go more narrowly, it will appeal even greater to the customer who is looking specifically just for what I create.

I have a fascination with pottery and sculpture, and one of my artists I like is Brendan Lee Satish Tang, particularly his Manga Ormolu works. I don’t know if anyone would sit down and say, “Gee, what I really want to add to my collection is a mixture of Chinese traditional pottery that has manga robot elements”.

This is similar to the concept discussed in Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech, where you make your art as your own and you go hard in on it.

I have a lot to say with my mental health realm I’d like to explore further, but I have assumed no one would like that art. So I might need to think more on this and see how I can work with it.

How the work would add to the fair is important

While not an explicit category of assessment, works were assessed by their contribution to the fair. Having 20 landscape artists would be a difficult category to compete in and the jury would want to ensure some kind of limit on the similarity of these kinds of works.

One application of a different artist was critiqued as being chaotic in the works themselves, and given the fair would itself be visually chaotic for goers, having an artist with chaotic works would also not help this. I did find this to be a statement of more personal aesthetic of the jury, but it also brings to mind the inherent competition and the subjectiveness given that comparisons are made to other applicants.

Another application with portrait heads was compared to an accepted application with portraits. It was pretty clear that while they were images of black women, one had gone all the way on the vision whereas the other was somewhat unclear on what it was trying to say.

Cohesiveness can be made from colour and subject matter

Cohesiveness was created from having similar colour schemes, but also the selection of works and how similar or different they were from one another.

Like my issue with producing variety, I thought a lot about what would be cohesive for the application submission. For my representational art, while it would be easy for me to stick to trees, or a geographic location. Interestingly, this was what was an unusual remark from my Queen West Art Crawl – that I produced so many different kinds of work, and this itself was intersting.

The negative effect of publicizing the jury process

With the many works being rejected in front of the crowd, I wondered whether it would discourage some artists and embolden others. It’s difficult not to compare your art with the art of others. Some asked about being part of the online section only since the presenters seemed to suggest that it was not as competitive and would have an exclusive cash grant. This I’m not sure of though since it seems there is a total cap on all artists participating.

It’s like what I’ve been reading in quantum physics: the observation actually affects the experiment. Here, the act of creating a jury process affects the pool of candidates. But I favour transparency and learned a lot so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

One of the artists on the jury had been rejected twice from this fair before getting accepted. Therefore, even good artists can face challenges with the limited spots and availability, and inherent subjectivity of the assessment.

The booth shot is more important than you think

Having a floor in the booth/installation shot was important. Scale could be provided from this, including from the plank boards or electrical outlets. I had wondered whether it would be more professional to show things in a tent. It being the dead of winter, it might be a bit challenging to do this and also think about what work I am creating/submitting. Someone also put a string of works on an OCAD wall and that was fine.

Having items propped up against a wall on top of other surfaces seemed to be ok as well. The unfortunate thing is that my current space lacks a big open free wall for me to take a clear shot that would show the floor – I would have furniture in the way.

Being self-taught is not a detriment and possibly a boon

One artist described themselves as self-taught. Considering how this was the strongest application in this pool, the jury was impressed with the fact that they were self-taught, and wondered whether that allowed for the creativity of medium. It seemed to provide if anything a benefit to give some leeway on certain items where technical proportions were not accurate.

I realized then that this is not an area of shame and in fact could be to my benefit. When I asked further about this, the member had described how it was apparent that I was serious about the art from making the application to begin with, so nothing to worry about here.

I am still debating about whether to highlight this in my own profile. For instance, if I take a number of other courses, would I then be considered as no longer “self-taught”?

My personality comes through my works

It was very surprising to hear that one of the jury members described my work as “playful” and “innocent” and they were won over with this. They liked the looseness of the works, in direct contrast with how many watercolour painters are focused on realism.

I have not been that interested in realism (I’m not sure if I could make it from a technical perspective anyway) since to me it restricts my ability to express and have my own style. But the connection of my own personality to my artwork is something new to me that I haven’t thought about.

When I was younger, I shocked a teacher when I had a nervous breakdown given how juxtaposed it was to his impression that I was a “bubbly person”. I His assessment of me is probably accurate (he was very nice) and it was interesting to see how this somehow came off through my work. Which leads me to a different question of where I go from here.

What to do now?

The artist statement fixes are easy since they are words. Making paintings in traditional medium is hard. It takes time, patience, money, and materials. My issue is how do I keep motivated, how to make work in spite of critiques, and how to transform what is negative into positive energy.

So much to think about.