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| October Song, Robert Genn |
For years I have subscribed to The Painter's Keys, an e-newsletter formerly published by Canadian painter Robert Genn and, since his death in 2014, continued by his daughter Sara, also a painter. The newsletter covers a broad range of topics of interest to artists in all media, and to art aficionados. Often an older post is pulled from the files and re-published.
A recent post, originally published in 2005, outlined the criteria that Robert Genn proposed to evaluate a work of art. Occasionally, Genn served as a judge or juror, and he would score the entries using the following "evaluation points":
- compositional integrity,
- sound craftsmanship,
- colour sensitivity,
- creative interest,
- design control,
- gestural momentum,
- artistic flair,
- expressive intensity,
- professional touch,
- surface quality,
- intellectual depth,
- visual distinction,
- technical challenge and
- artistic audacity.
He wrote,
"If you were to assign a maximum value of 10 to each of these fourteen points, an almost impossible top mark would be 140. Loosely speaking, a total of around 50 is often enough for an “in.” My system doesn’t favour realism over non-objective work, but in my jury duty hard-won realism often wins out with these points."
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| Grove with Yellow Green, Robert Genn, |
While I would have trouble distinguishing "artistic flair" from "artistic audacity", I would not argue with the double-weighting of this quality. The vocabulary of the checklist is helpful when I try to articulate my response to a particular work, whether it is my own or other's.
The original article may be found here. The terms are further explained in a subsequent post.
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