And the Winner is...
When I was perhaps around 7 or 8 years old, we joined an Easter Egg painting contest in the village. As excited as we were to paint boiled eggs and fill them with colors and dots and lines (which was how I understood Easter Eggs as a child and even until now), I could still vividly remember all the mess we made with the wet paint running on each other until my dots no longer looked like dots but blobs of colors. It was FUN, and the Easter Egg Hunt was the BEST PART.
Going back to the egg painting contest -- I obviously didn't win with my colorful blobs. The others with colorful dots and zigzag lines didn't win either.
The "winning egg" in that contest was a bright red one. No stripes. No dots. It was plain red all over. Even without knowing the term "sour graping" then, I remember hearing parents talk that the "winning egg" probably won, because the child was related to the judges. Oh adults can be so funny. Anyway, fast forward to my adult life, I read in a book (how many countless nameless art books have I read? -- I promise to edit this part when I get the book title and author) that the most "saleable" art color is tandandan -- RED. No wonder that kid's egg won!
Seriously though, I think she won mostly for originality. Whoever thinks Easter Eggs could be plain red? Don't we all try to paint the same Easter Eggs year in and year out -- pastels, dots, zigzag lines, lines, and so on and so forth. And amidst all the similar looking eggs, there was that brave girl who painted her entire egg vigorously and beautifully RED -- the most striking color of all. It was a different egg. And she won.
It's funny how we make art contests when art can be so subjective. I can imagine how easy it is to judge Spelling Bees and Quiz Bees because the answers are factual. But how do we say that one art is better than the other? There must be a secret to it that I have yet to find out in the future. Nonetheless, what I'm trying to point out here are three things:
1) The little girl just painted the egg the way she wanted to.
2) The judges, whoever they were, were entitled to their own subjective preference of what a "winning Easter Egg" would be. In this case, the RED egg.
3) And to YOU, the artist reading this, you are ALLOWED TO CREATE WHATEVER YOU WANT TOO. There's no need to win anything. Just do it.
Having said all of that, I actually had that "winning egg" and that "saleable" color at the back of my mind when I created these commissioned pieces. They wanted bright and vibrant, without having a Christmas-y feel. So, I kept all my swirls, textures, and waves with that RED in mind. These are actually parts 1 and 2 of a triptych entitled "Day to Night". And yes, I -- with all my human subjectivity -- love my own work. Gratefully, the owners of these commissioned art pieces absolutely love them too.
Parts 1 and 2 of "Day to Night" A Triptych. Acrylic on 28" x 32" Canvas
