Festival

My Top 3

well, i submitted a couple paintings to the local annual art festival.

a couple of paintings which were not selected.

it’s okay, it really is. after a long history of sending hundreds of poems to hundreds of magazines where unpaid interns slipped preprinted rejection slips into my self addressed stamped envelopes, well, i’m used to handling rejection. this is not to say that i like it. no one likes it. but one gets used to not allowing rejection to tear down the impetus for creating art in the first place. in other words, joy. 

plus, there’s always next year. 

when i picked up my “not selected” art work and stood in line with a bunch of other not selected artists, it was a bit of camaraderie i hadn’t expected.

sure, we all had slightly sour expressions on our faces. it’s hard to feel proud in a line of losers.

but then the volunteers began bringing the pieces out, and they were lovely. one painting taken away by a gray haired lady was a large acrylic painting of a vase of flowers. the color scheme and texture were admirable. another was an oil portrait of a girl sitting among ferns–it looked professionally done. and another set of oils, more flowers in a bright expressionistic style. i would have been proud to have painted them.

looking at these “not selected” paintings made me want to see what had been selected. these were all so good. i could imagine them all on the walls of the old art museum. it made me want to go down to festival in a month so i could see the winners. 

a woman in front of me had two pieces taken last year and nothing this year, which i took to confirm that all such artistic competitions maintain a certain arbitrariness. i can translate that arbitrariness into a comfort zone. yes, i can.

on the way out, i saw two women stowing a large painting–it must have been 5 x 7 feet with metal prongy things sticking out the front–and i realized how much work had gone into–not just the painting–but hauling the damn thing all the way down there. then hauling it away. (and the hope, of course. hope is more work than hauling).

and as i got closer to my car, awkwardly hauling my own two large and heavy paintings, i walked by a young man who i thought was staring at a child in the back seat of his car. 

i looked back to see him reach into the car and pull out a wooden board with a wire stretched across the back. he was scrutinizing his paintings–there on the sidewalk. there were three of them in the back seat, and he pulled them out one by one, looking closely, wondering maybe what those other paintings had that his didn’t. i didn’t see pain or disappointment on his face. just scrutiny. 

and maybe a sense of wonder that whoever it was who made the selections, how could he have missed these? —all this genuine talent and vision so readily apparent to anyone who really bothered to see…..?