April Issue 2001
Jurors Statement: Gerald F. Brommer
I thank the Southern Watercolor Society for asking me to jury this current exhibition. I have long considered this group to be a very important aspect of the world of watercolor, and being able to study the slides of work from this section of the country has only strengthened my conviction. The work is highly professional, personal in content, and broad in scope and expression. It is very difficult to eliminate over 500 images in order to reduce the entries to a required 90 or so pieces. Many excellent works were therefore not selected, but this is the cost of professional competition.
You must realize that we make art because we have to! We have no choice but to express ourselves visually. We share our visions, our sensitivities and our compassion. We share our agony, our wrath and our frustrations. We also share our loves, our personal insights and our deepest convictions. Through our art we lay ourselves out on paper for all the world to see, because we paint what we are. When we exhibit our work, others can explore and experience our beliefs, our reactions, our biases, our loves and our spiritual beings.
It takes special people to share themselves with others in such personal ways, and such people are called "artists."
Of course, our products have something to do with technique, decoration, craftsmanship design and subject matter. But these are merely tools that help us create more effective art - help us communicate more articulately. What we express visually is what is within each of us, for that is the foundation and purpose of our art. We express reactions; we help others see differently or more clearly; we assist in the recognizing of relationships. We explore visual dynamics and report on human events. We decorate surfaces and we express our unbounded joy in the very act of creating. We create because it is an essential part of our lives. We cannot help but be artists.
The artists in this exhibition have chosen to use watercolor as their vehicle of expression. Possibly they could have been just as articulate had they used oils, printing presses, welded steel or plastic, but they chose to use waterbased pigments. Good art is not determined by media! Good art is not even determined by subject matter or size; nor is it determined by realism, abstraction or nonobjectivity. Regardless of media, styles, size or subject matter, good art is determined by "the quality and effectiveness of sincere visual expression."
As you study the art in this exhibition, listen to what the artists are saying - about their world, their lives, their work, their joys; about their personal reactions to their environment, their fellow humans and their God: about order, chaos, color or the warmth of sunshine. By their visual expressions they have communicated with rich visual and personal vocabularies and have made their visual statements (their art) for our benefit. Enjoy!
And thanks to all the artists for sharing themselves
and their art with me for a week. It has enriched my life!
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