Believing The Glass Is Half Full
I recently won the prestigious Marilyn Sabin Award at the New England Watercolor Society's Regional Juried Exhibition 2017. The Juror Of Selection & Awards was the accomplished national watercolorist Kathleen Conover. The following is her comment about the show:
"It is an honor and privilege to be this year's judge for the New England Watercolor Society. The selection from approximately 500 paintings down to 60 was very difficult! The resulting exhibit of paintings is an excellent representation of the best of contemporary watercolor in America today: skilled, confident, creative, and expressive. The exhibiting artists have pushed the boundaries of our materials, explored new avenues of expression, visually communicated concepts and shown us another view of our world. This is the best of contemporary painting in any medium.
The most difficult task in judging an exhibition is choosing awards. Acknowledging that judging art is unavoidably a subjective task, there is an important set of objective criteria I certainly look for: content, composition, uniqueness of vision and skillful handling of medium. Any painting that holds all these qualities is certainly an award winner. Congratulations to all the artists exhibiting in the News regional exhibition and especially to the ten award winners."
-Kathleen Conover, 2017 juror of selection and awards
I remember the faith it took to enter this painting,"Stacking Lobster Traps, Mohegan Island" My first hurtle was not being able to enter local shows with my best work because I made the decision to enter the NEWS regional show instead. I had no guarantees to even get into the New England watercolor show, and in all of my local shows I didn't even place. I just held onto a hope to be included in the NEWS regional show with some of the best known watercolor painters in New England represented. It wasn't easy.
I also remember the delivery day thinking that my painting was all ready to be shipped, so I waited until the day before delivery to actually check to see if the large elephant sized watercolor painting had the required plexi-glass pane instead of real glass. I was sure it did, but I was wrong! That Saturday morning I was panicked with the task of having to replace the glass and getting it to my daughter Kimberly who lives in New Hampshire the same day! She meet me in southern Maine and then would later travel to Rhode Island within the next day to enter the painting at the drop off date. With a lot of running around and the very kind collaboration between School Street Picture Framing and Hobby Lobby I was able to switch the glass out of the frame.
By 11 am on that Saturday I was on my way, with an unexpected expense that put me in the red $100.00 for the plexi glass. Needless to say the stakes were high and many might have just given up right there, or worse, tried to enter the painting that would surely be rejected because it didn't meet the guidelines of the show, even after being hand delivered all that way. My wife and I made good time on the highway and meet up with my daughter an hour later than we planned, and we all took a deep breath and ate at Cracker Barrel in South Portland, Maine that afternoon.
As Kimberly drove off to deliver my painting that day, I gave a sigh of relief. It was in good capable hands Now and had done all that I could think of doing. I remember saying after all that opposition I went through, "Something good is going to happen out of all this effort." I began to think of how my faith sometimes finds me in battles that I am made to recognize, engage in and go through in order to experience victory. I remember in my early football days when we played against the best teams the motivating slogans were like, "If there is no battle, there can be no victory! or "The bigger the battle the sweeter the Victory!" When we have battles of our own, the hardest thing for us to sometimes do is acknowledge that we're in one! On the mountain top when things are going good or in the valley when things are not going so good our Creator is still in control! And if we can come into agreement with that and believe the victory is just around the corner, I believe it will be there for us. Indeed, doing everything you know to do, no matter how difficult or inconvenient it seems at the time, is the belief needed that causes something good to happen.
First of all I was ironically the only watercolor artist in Maine who was accepted into the NEWS regional show 2017. When the painting was delivered it was very well received by the people registering the paintings. More recently I discovered I won the very prestigious Marilyn Sabin Award that I'm told is as honorable as the First Place prize winner at least by way of a cash award. So on June 8th and 9th I will be going to the opening to receive my national award and check. I have been given two days off with pay from my public school where I teach part time art classes, because as my principal has said, they believe teachers should also be honored as well as students. Many thanks to the Indian Island School and Maine Indian Education.
In closing I would like to say something about how entering this painting was a perfect battle in the making, not for the NEWS staff but for me. I had to believe early on that something good was going to come out of all the set backs I was experiencing and that it was all going to be worth it in the end. I had a choice to make. To give into the fear of the battle and accept my mistake or I could believe in the best for this painting even though what I was going through at the time was not at all positive. So I chose to believe in the best outcome for this painting. First, I set my mind in believing that I would get into this competitive show. Secondly, that I would win an award. And lastly, in the end, that the painting would be purchased by the right buyer. Two of those wishes have come true so far, and I am still believing that the painting will sell in the exhibit at the Rhode Island Museum of Art. Either way, it took a village to believe with me that this painting would do well, even though there was no sign of it working out at the beginning. So for having the faith to believe when setbacks happened, I would like to thank my wife and best friend Elaine, my daughter Kimberly Mitchell Allen, the excellent staff at School Street Picture Framing who helped me in the eleventh hour, Hobby Lobby and Annemarie Swanson, the Principal at the Indian island School for believing with me that the glass really is half full!
Michael E. Vermette
The following are the details of the show:
Newport Art Museum
76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI 02840
NEWPORTARTMUSEUM.ORG
Congratulations to the award winners
View the online gallery
May 20, 2017-July 9, 2017
Tues-Sat, 10:00 am-4:00 pm; Sunday, noon-4:00 pm
New this year: shop and buy show artwork online. Click here to browse available work.
Reception & Awards
Thursday, June 8, 5-7pm
Show Events (free and open to the public - held at the museum)
Collect: MECA's June 2017 Invitational Art Sale.
Two of my watercolor paintings have been selected to be a part of Maine College of Art's 2017 COLLECT: an Invitational Art Sale.
Important Dates
COLLECT Private Events
Wednesday, June 28th [not open to public] 5:30-7:30pm Porteous Society Reception
COLLECT Public Events
Thursday, June 29, 10am-6pm
Friday, June 30, 10am-6pm
Saturday, July 1, 10am-6pm
