Written by By Gerald Boyd, Chairman of PASTELS USA 2019.
Our 33rd Pastels USA exhibition is set for next May at the Haggin Museum, and we have secured a commitment from three artist/judges as the “Jury of Selection”. The Awards Judge will be Dawn Emerson of Terrebonne, Oregon.
The Jurors of Selection will be: Debora L. Stewart of Clinton, Iowa, Gary Huber of Buffalo, Wyoming, and William Truman Hosner who lives in Ferndale, Michigan.
Dawn Emerson won our Pastels USA Best of Show in 1997 with a painting called “Horses” (a recurring theme in her paintings) She has authored a book called “Pastel Innovations”.
Debora L. Stewart does beautiful abstract and very impressionistic works, and I thought it would be refreshing to have a Juror of Selection with a different vision and direction than the majority of us.
Gary Huber is a landscape painter who was one of the artists featured in our magazine/show catalog at this year’s exhibition.
William Truman Hosner is a familiar name to most of us as not only a high profile nationally known artist who is equally adept at portrait/figure and landscape works, but has supported our shows consistently. William was our first three-time Pastels USA Best of Show winner.
Allow me to highlight two new rules for the upcoming show which you will note when you read the prospectus.
For those of us who work most often from photos, we will require the artist to have taken their reference photos themselves. Many societies such as PSA are going that direction and the reasoning is that the artist experiences the subject for themselves and composes what they want to emphasize in the viewfinder or screen of the camera. There are “copyright-free” photo sites where you can purchase essentially professional quality photos for reference. While this, like many other rules, is dependent on the honesty of the artist, it is overall a good idea to use this practice so that you may enter your piece in any exhibition with a clear conscience.
The second rule is “less”, rather than “more” restrictive. The age of a painting has always been an issue for most societies and so we are expanding from a maximum age of two years to three years for a painting. This will help with those who can’t enter the same painting in overlapping shows or who get worthy paintings eliminated by our “one painting per artist” rule in Pastels USA. Two years from when you do a painting goes by awfully quickly it seems.