I’ve been blessed with receiving awards in gallery shows in recent years, and it has helped me (and the self-reproach of my inner critic) to value my work more. One of the things about artists (not to speak for all of us, but you know…) is that we are never finished with a piece. For this painting, I seem never to be finished with its name.
Originally, I called it Red, White, and Blue based on the visual colors but also the obvious deeper meaning of how this nation has treated those who are not white. This only works as long as you see his expression as more WTF than playful.
Then I changed it to Your Black Friend, because the subject did put himself out there as just that (see this); but again, that works only as long as the viewer reads his facial expression as “Did you really just say that?”
I submitted it to a local gallery well outside of the city for its annual juried show — one I’ve been proud to receive awards from in the past couple of years — under that name. As I feared, it was not accepted. I have to say, I consider this painting to be representative of some of my best work. But it’s big, it’s in your face, and perhaps a little “too much” for a more buttoned-down part of the state. I tried to chalk it up to just being not accepted against a lot of very good submissions by very talented artists, and pushed my anger aside as unfounded and egoic. Who the hell am I to be frustrated that my painting wasn’t accepted to a show which gets a lot of great entries?
But I was then determined that this painting would hang in that gallery, so I paid my membership dues and submitted it to the very next members’ show (which are not juried). This time, though, I didn’t title it. It was submitted simply as Untitled, and when I walked it in to drop it off, everyone oohed and aahed over it. It was hung on the stairway inside the entrance to the gallery and awarded an Honorable Mention.
The award was given by someone or a group unaffiliated with the jurors of the Annual Juried Show and is very much appreciated. It does make me wonder, though, if it would have been accepted in the previous show if I’d simply left it untitled. While there is a part of me that says my work simply wasn’t good enough to be accepted, there is a practical part of me that says that, as an artist, I just need to know my audience. And there is the part that asks why it should matter.
Nancy Anderson 