Did you use this rhyme to choose between things when you were little? It is a way of breaking absolute indecision by resorting to a random sorting device. I can’t say that I recommend it, but today I am almost reduced to using it.
Painting has been cruising along very productively of late. I have run into an old problem, however, which is how I should select work for exhibition. Let’s face it, all exhibition spaces are limited, and competitive exhibitions usually impose some kind of restriction on the number of pieces that they will consider from any one artist. I’m facing this problem at the moment. In two weeks’ time I have to deliver my entry for the Sheffield Open, for which I am permitted to propose a maximum of six items. How should I go about the selection process?
There are several groups of pieces with a common theme that I could consider. After enjoying a couple of my semi-regular “retreat weeks” in that area, I could concentrate on local interest. I have done that before, but if I do this it will mean including, and consequently putting up for sale, pieces that I would really like to reserve in order to show as a group with a different thematic focus on some other occasion.
It might be possible to select simply six items that I think are good, but (perhaps wrongly) I feel that the impact of my display as a whole might be weakened by its lacking any thematic or stylistic unity.
What I have settled on, after long deliberation, is a group of six of my “Malta Suite”. Although I did offer one of these pieces (successfully) to the recent Patchings exhibition, the set as a whole has never been presented to the public. There is only one snag …. there are seven pictures in the series. How on earth am I going to select one to be eliminated?
I can’t use the criterion (used, for example by the Great North Art Show) that they must constitute a “body of work”. They meet that test, but it is useless as a means of discriminating between them. I have tried asking myself whether one of the seven is conspicuously weaker than any of the others. That is a hard one, because I can think of relatively weak points in several of them. I undermined that as a tool of selection recently by modifying and greatly improving what otherwise might have been thought of as the weakest. (Shot myself in the foot there, I fear!)
Before you suggest it, yes, I have tried asking my wife. The trouble with that one is that I’m not entirely convinced by her argument. She has a point, but ….. My sister-in-law is coming to stay over the next few days, and I could ask her opinion. There is a strong possibility, however, that I will end up with three opinions then in place of two. I’ve already realised that the opinion of others can be an insecure basis for selection. Some time ago another member of the family was looking at the series just after I had completed it. His greatest enthusiasm was expressed for a piece I find is now on my short list for exclusion.
When it comes to the crunch, of course, I am just going to have to take responsibility for my own selection. I hope it doesn’t come down to “Eeny, meeny miney, mo ….”