It’s hard to let yourself be vulnerable. Especially with something as personal as art. When an artist shares a work they create, they are opening up and exposing the heart and soul and mind.

Let me put it to you this way. Have you ever had a dream, a bad sort of dream where you find yourself naked in public? Everyone is all comfortable with their clothes on, their imperfections and secrets nicely covered over and hidden but oh oh…not you…for you, everything is hanging out there for the whole wild world to see. It feels kind of like THAT!

Will you be praised and admired? criticized? ridiculed? or possibly the worst, ignored? But herein lies the rub. You won’t know until you put yourself out there. So why take the chance? Because sometimes…something wonderful happens like what happened to me when I recently entered a painting into the 2017 RHGA Open Juried Art Show.

I’d received an e-mail from my art group about the upcoming RHGA Open Juried Show and that the jurors for the show would be Anik Glaude, curator for the Varley Art Gallery and Jeff Nye, a visual artist who recently exhibited at the Varley Art Gallery who’s work I greatly admired. Now these are two people who’s opinion is worth something. At least it is to me. So I decided to create a piece to enter into the show.

Drop off for the show was on last Monday, Nov. 3rd and if you got a call on the Tuesday, your piece had been selected for the show. Tuesday was a long day. The morning passes by…no call. I figure that’s probably because that’s when the jurors are adjudicating the show. 1 o’clock…2 o’clock…3 o’clock, now I start thinking that maybe I’m not going to get the call and my heart sinks a wee bit. I tell myself to not get discouraged. It will be what it will be. To distract myself I put my mind to other tasks and then at 4:05pm the phone rings for the first time that day. It’s the Richmond Hill Group of Artists. I’m in the show! I can hardly concentrate on what Andrea End (President of the RHGA) is saying because I’m so excited and doing a happy dance and then she tells me to hang on…the other thing she wanted to tell me is that my piece, “Enchanted Cedars” had won an Honorable Mention Award. BAM…over the moon!

Friday night was the opening reception and awards presentation and I got the honor to meet and speak with both Anik Glaude and Jeff Nye. It was wonderful to be able to tell them how much it meant to me that they saw something they liked in my work.

So you see…if you put yourself out there, sometimes something wonderful happens!

The show has 3 more dates… Nov. 10 – 6-9pm, Nov. 11 & 12 – 11am-5pm at The Mill Pond Gallery 314 Mill St., Richmond Hill, ON. Come check it out if you can. The artwork is seriously impressive.

Below are some pictures I took of Jeff Nye’s brilliant exhibit “Recovery Rooms” on one of my many visits to see his show at the Varley Art Gallery. The red one in the middle literally took my breath away when I first saw it. The picture doesn’t do it justice. In person it is alive and radiates a dynamic energy.

To learn more about Jeff Nye
To learn more about The Varley Art Gallery
To learn more about The Richmond Hill Group Of Artists