Open Submission Exhibitions & Prizes (Patreon)

Over the last 34 weeks we've been sharing Lance's Tutored Life Drawing blogs on Mondays. That series is now complete and you'll find all 34 posts available to re-read via the Navigator here; Life Drawing / Student tier supporters will also be able to access recordings of all 34 hours of tutored classes. As we finally enjoy some summery weather here in the UK, you might want to look back at these blogs about drawing outdoors and for those of you in Brighton, you might want to visit Lance in person at our Thursday 1-3pm figure drawing sessions in Preston Park. Over this next month we'll be sharing new blog posts on how to make the most of our life drawing & portrait resources and strategies for developing your creative practice - later this week I will also be posting big update on the classes we'll be running via Patreon this summer. For those of your who are thinking of taking your work artwork work further, todays blog will focus on how to enter your work into Open Submissions exhibitions. 

Main image: 'Morphometry of Essence' - an exhibited entry to Wells Art Contemporary by Caragh Savage  

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Open Submission Exhibitions & Prizes

Open submission exhibitions are an excellent way to get your work seen by peers, buyers and galleries. While the work selected for the shows is of a professional standard, you don't have to be a full time professional artist to take part and the exhibitions often provide an accesible leg up, helping aspiring artists, students and graduates to show alongside established professionals. Most open exhibitions offer cash and in-kind prizes of mentoring & support alongside the exhibition opportunity and many are open to international applications. It can be tricky to find details of these opportunities in one place, so you'll need to look out for Calls for Entries on the social media and websites of organisations linked to the exhibitions like the Mall Galleries or Parker Harris, or paid-for opportunities boards like Axis Web. In this blog you'll find a run down of the stages of an open submission competition, some tips for entering, a upcoming opportunities and some notes on rejection...

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Stages of an Open Submission Opportunity 

There are several stages and dates associated with an open submission exhibition or prize - here are the major ones to consider: 

Registration - some exhibitions require you to register online before entering - the deadline for registration may be earlier than the submission closing date, so make sure you've registered in good time. 

Submission opening - this is the date from which you can submit. The window for submission can vary from several weeks to several months. Although most regular exhibitions don't advertise their submission dates very far ahead, the previous years dates might roughly indicate when submissions will open. 

Submission closing - this is the final date that you can submit work. Make sure you leave enough time to finish, photograph and upload your work before this date - don't leave it all to the day of the deadline. You will usually need to pay for your entry when submitting; submission might also be followed by a second round of judging. 

Selection date - this is the date when you will be notoified of where your work has been selected. If it hasn't been selected, your journey ends here. If your work has you have a final stage ahead...

Exhibition - Once you have arranged for delivery of the artwork you will have the private view to look forward to, the exhibition itself and the possibility of winning prizes for your submission, or of selling work. Finally you'll need to collect unsold work at the end of the show.

Photo provided by Parker Harris / Mall Galleries

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Tips for entering:

• Strike a balance. Work made solely to enter into competitions and open exhibitions can feel contrived, yet the deadlines provided by submission dates can be a great motivator for finishing work or focusing your practice. Aim to hold the intention to submit to specific open submission opportunities in balance with your intention to make work with integrity. 
• Enter appropriate shows. Check the submission criteria and look at past submissions from past exhibitions online to make sure work that you are entering work suitable for the exhibition. 
• Take good photos. A hi-res, good quality digital reproduction of your work is critical for a successful submission - here is some good advice from Drawing Circus photographer Roy Matthews on how to take a good photograph for submission on the RA website.
• Put your hat in the ring. Check the Ts & Cs and put yourself forward for any awards that you might be eligible for - ie. young artists awards, drawing bursaries etc.
• Budget for entry. Most submissions have a cost, so you'll need to budget for entering work - if you are taking your work seriously enough to enter, you will need to work this cost into you planning, as well as the costs of framing and delivering work if you get in. 

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Open Submission Exhibitions you can enter right now:

Figurative Art Now - Submission closes 1st June 2021. More details HERE. 

Trinity Buoy Warf Drawing Prize - Submission closes 15th June 2021. More details HERE.

TBW Working Drawing Prize - Submission closes 17th June 2021. More details HERE. 

UK Coloured Pencil Society - Submission closes 31st July 2021. More details HERE.

ING Discerning Eye - Submission closes 7th Sept 2021. More details HERE.

Photo provided by Parker Harris / Trinity Buoy Warf Drawing Prize

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Thoughts on rejection

Few of us ever get to the point where we feel our work is unequivocally good enough to be entered into an exhibition, and the fear of rejection can put as off entering. In a past talk Draw the landscape painter Hester Berry told a class of aspiring artists that she entered around 10 open submission competitions a year, expecting to get work into around 2 of the 10 - they were carefully chosen to suit the work she submitted and she only put in work she thought was good enough to be in with a chance of being selected. That might mean that in a year you could enter eight exhibitions and get rejected for all eight before getting accepted into a single one. Then she'd enter another. And another. It reminded me of what my own mentor, John T. Freeman, told me when I was 16, that "All artists need to learn two things: how to draw, and how to deal with rejection - not necessarily in that order". 

Conversely, I once met a couple attending a drawing class together - the wife of the couple told me she had always wanted to enter the RA Summer Exhibition and eventually her husband, who didn't draw himself, had encouraged her to finally give it a go, promising to enter a drawing himself if she put her her own work forward. Like most of the thousands who enter she did not get her work in but was pleased to have put it forward - he on the other hand had his naive self-portait drawing accepted and to his amazement won a prize for the drawing. They had started drawing after his win and she planned to enter again the following year.

You shouldn't enter an open submission competition exhibition just to get your work shown and win a prize, neither is there any point entering if you expect to fail. Art-making is not a sport and your own will to win does not motivate you over the last hurdle to victory - making good art is an ongoing process of engagement and exploration set within the context of a community of other makers. By entering these kinds of open exhibitions you are stepping forward as a member of that community to say "I am taking my work seriously enough that I think it has value and I want to see it on the wall alongside the work of my peers". Your work might be selected because it is very good, or like the husband who submitted his first ever portait, because some quality in it appealed to the judges at the time. Equally it may be rejected because it is not to the taste of that years selection panel, or because enough eligible work had already been chosen. The outcome doesn't matter as much as the intention behind entering and the engagement that it catalyses. Enter all of the open opportunities that suit your work and whether they get in or not, enter them again next year; if you work hard and make good art, you might eventually get work into 2 in every 10 shows. Aside from the prize money and the opportunity to exhibit, the real value in entering an open submission opportunity is in taking your work seriously enough to decide you can enter and feeling part of the community of other artists who have done the same - both the accepted and the rejected.

Good luck!
Jake

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