I became a selected artist in Loupe Art open call. But what does it means?
Competition is never easy. When an artist sends his painting to an open call, he hopes to win, but often realizes that these hopes may not come true. Probably because always and everywhere there are "winners" and "losers" in it. Everyone wants to be first and nobody wants to be last. Do you think art is like sports? Sport is an easily determined activity. You can always take a tape measure and measure the distance, weigh in kilograms or count the number of goals scored. But how, then, is art to be measured? How to determine who is better? It is possible to measure the square meters of those paintings that the artist painted. It will probably show some degree of practice, but no more.
Let's imagine for a second that we are opening a gallery. For example, in Barcelona. It is a developed European city with an amazing history, distinctive culture and a large number of sophisticated audiences interested in art. Our task would be to surprise the visitors of our gallery and at the same time show art that could be placed in your home or office. How do you choose artists?
You can choose those you like according to our own preferences. You can choose those who like the wide majority. Only those who have specialized education are allowed. But for each of these cases, there are many examples from history when the rule did not work. Our artistic taste may be far from ideal, the broad masses are not representative of the target audiences, and an artist with education turned out to be not interesting to collectors, like a random self-taught artist. For example, a painting by an artist without education, Paul Gauguin, Quand te maries-tu? was sold in 2015 for $ 300 million.
“First of all, I would like to note the expressiveness of the painting, - says Alex Victor Ignatenko, a young artist from Barcelona. - Both in classical painting and in abstraction, the very first step is composition, the play of graphic elements, textures. What about open calls, last 2 month there were four open calls and I became the selected artist in two of them. "
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that not every competition is suitable for a particular artist. Impressionism competition - for the impressionists. However, there are moments for the frustration of the artist when the artist creates abstract landscapes and his works cannot be accepted either for the landscape open call or for the abstract open call.
As in any professional field, technical meticulousness is also valued in painting. This is probably one of the basic principles. The second - and probably the main criterion - is the emotions that the viewer experiences, the images that arise in a person who interacts with art. But this is the personal opinion of the author of this article.