A statement from our Juror Kevin Gilmore for his second place award in ONLY SQUARES APPLY Second Place - After the Beach - Charles Noël This landscape…so much more than a landscape painting. It is a peaceful place, a moment in time, and I am there with all of my senses. Perhaps a coastal town in Maine, a side street on Martha’s Vineyard, Prudence Island, or even Outer Banks, NC. And it is a place I could just be, exist, for a very long time, in the quietude the artist presents here. Something feels slightly surreal in the way the artist uses colors. It’s not precise,teetering on impressionistic, yet describes the moment with deep emotion, reflective, contemplative. The sky is full of grays, as if a storm is coming, yet the warm glows of a setting sun drenches the foliage, cottage, and road. It feels like the rare occurrence when the 90% of the sky is ready to drop a deluge of rain, but in the west, the sun is setting below this low cloud storm front piercing the landscape with remaining light. Compositionally, what I found most stunning is the interplay between the two telephone poles and the two shadows in the foreground. The heavy lean of the left pole describesthis scene, one steeped in tradition, old, untouched for decades - a kind of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” feeling. The one on the right seems to be saying, “hey it’s all good…”To personify these structures may seem silly, but it is reminiscent for me of the trees in Four Trees (1917) painted by Egon Schiele - they each have their own personality. The two poles point to the left, which as the eye moves around the painting, the two shadows point to the right. It is within this compositional zig-zag that the cottage sits, untouched, quiet, stoic. The artist’s composition, paint strokes, and color choices create the atmosphere, the sense of place, the time of day, leaving the viewer to make up stories about what is inside the cottage. I picture mix-matched dishes and repurposed jelly jars for drinking lemonade, old monopoly board games and checkers with bottle caps and tarnished pennies that replaced missing pieces, frayed and warn couches, wood paneling,containers of shells and sea glass, and avocado-green appliances. The opportunity to reflect on my own personal memories of vacation cottages is given tome by this artist through their intuitive color play, direct plein-air style handling of oil paint, and attention to composition. The subtle catenary drooping of the old electric andlines, rendered with a tiny brush and the back of a brush scratched are like the final punctuations left by the painter. Beautiful experience seeing this painting. (fb)

A note from our juror @kevingilmoreart about our current show ONLY SQUARES APPLY: Thank you for trusting me with your work. Narrowing a group of amazing art (nearly 200) down to just over 50 was an exciting and difficult task. I was given images, title, medium,and size only. The exhibition coordinators and art handlers created an expansive show, allowing each work its own space on the wall - no small feat. The theme, squares, creates a stunning visual thread throughout the exhibition! Truly an honor to preview the work in person, and select the awards. I interpreted Only Squares Apply in several ways. The prospectus mentions, “Squares can symbolize stability, order, and a sense of security…equality, simplicity, and balance.” There is an embedded play of words here. A “Square” was someone in the 1940’s who wasn’t hip to Jazz. Clearly, as seen in all of these works, and against the aging meaning of a “square”… innovators, poets, and hip contemporaries all submitted to this call. I paid close attention to materials, looked for clearly demonstrated skill level within a medium, innovation, creativity, artisanship, modern approaches to art-making, and as always, that one poetic moment…that something extra, or even perhaps a quiet resistance. The idea of “art for art’s sake” or that an artwork must stand on its own, apart from the maker, feels as dated as being a square because you don’t like jazz. My approach as an art critic is that I am looking for the artist in the painting, sculpture, photo, collage, etc. Can I feel the artist’s presence as I look through layers of paint, in the composition, in the preparation and final exhibition strategies? Is the artist’s voice present? Does a title of a work add crucial context, like a whisper from the artist herself? (fb)