much ado…….

I always promised myself that I wouldn’t use this platform for self promotion. Well that’s still the case but sometimes it just can’t be helped if it occurs as a result of making a serious – well semi-serious – point. After the excitement of breaking through in the prestigious Harley Gallery Open this year I settled down for a peaceful second half of the year.

Here comes the serious point – how many times in your life do you put your heart and soul into something and it turns out…well, not as you were hoping? I can tell you as an artist it’s almost a daily occurrence! The thing is never to cast these things away as an embarrassment, because sometimes we are ill placed to judge something’s true worth. On a whim shortly after my Harley escapade I submitted three paintings to the even more prestigious (sorry Harley!) ING Discerning Eye exhibition, one of which was a quickly executed self portrait, you know one of those works I was just talking about falling short of expectations. If you’re ahead of me at this point you’ll not be surprised to learn that of course it was selected by the very discerning Discerning Eye judges (along with its companion piece) for exhibition in the 2020 event. And this is after years of trying and failing to get other work accepted.

This exhibition is on now but sadly only online this year for obvious reasons. Well point made I think! never, ever dismiss your work, any work, as worthless junk. You are not the arbiter merely the creator. Here are the two successful artworks. I’ll let you figure out which one I was talking about.

discerningeye.org/home