Stand out in a sea of paintings

I’ve recovered from the weekend show. I realize now that one of the benefits of doing that show was to see the sea of artwork out there. It was a sea of color, frames, landscapes, figures, and still lifes. Nothing stood out. I don’t think those mesh walls helped, but that’s what we have to work with. I did consider covering mine with cloth or burlap next time, but I don’t think there will be a next time for this particular show. But covering those things with cloth is an idea for any show of this type. Anyway, all this artwork has caused me to stand back and evaulate my next step. I’ll post a couple of photos of the show so you can get an overall view.

Imagine 50 (fifty!) of these booths and I would say 45 of them were full of paintings. We have to stand out in this sea of paintings. This means something different to everyone, but it’s time for me to figure out what this means to me. Choosing one genre would have helped, almost everyone had a variety of still lifes, figures and landscapes. I’ve painted in different variations of my own style over the last year so I didn’t have a definable style. This was a very common problem. One of the other artists said if you looked at her booth it looked like 3 people painted her paintings, not one. That was true for 99% of the booths.

So it’s time to do some experimenting for me. I need to find my own voice and let it come out in my paintings. I realize I can’t just sit down and do that this afternoon. It’ll take some searching. Somplace in those tubes of paint is my voice, I just have to let it out. It’ll take many paintings but I’ll start this afternoon. Some will be failures. I hope some will be failures, that will mean I pushed myself and wasn’t afraid to try something new. In fact, that’s what this year was going to be about for me, for just painting and finding my own voice. I guess I forgot that in the excitement of putting my work out in front of people.