Out By The Edge

At the Belmar Arts Council it's time for the annual Art on the Edge show.  The time of year has changed over the years, but I'm thinking this will be the fourth edition.  It has generally been a successful show over the years, bringing in a slightly different group of artists and viewers than many of our shows do, despite there being no clear consensus on what the show is about.  The idea of "edgy" is in the eye of the beholder.  At a planning meeting for an early edition of the show, a volunteer became upset to learn that we would not have any monitors set up to show digital art, saying without such art there was no point to our show.  (she then suddenly decided to she had no time to work on our show anyway and left)  Last year I was contacted by someone who had just submitted work to the show and after seeing the postcard, was upset that she had submitted her mixed media painting to a "graffiti" show and no one had warned her.  I replied that though the card had a graffiti based design (specialty of the artist who designed it), the show was open to all kinds of art, and no surprise to me, her piece did get accepted.

Any time there is a juror involved it's hard to predict what will happen, and we tend to bring in outside people to be our jurors.  And when I have no idea what the juror(s) like, I try to give them a choice- a couple of different subjects and styles, and hope something sticks.  So I went with a color piece (above) from the Ecclesiastes series, which seems to have some kind of message, even if it's not clear what it is, and a print from my supermarket series (below), which refers to alcohol and violence.  Both prints have good strong graphics if nothing else.  I submitted them today, while the deadline is the middle of next week.  A week after that, the juror decisions are announced, and I"ll have an update for everyone then.