For many years, the colored pencil artist has had an uphill fight for their
place among artists using various other media. Not only were works in
colored pencil perceived as works relegated to drafting illustrations or
children's work, but the lack of lightfastness hampered the credibility of
works in colored pencil. With new lightfast pencils, a growing professional
organization, and more sophisticated application techniques, works in colored
pencil are taking their rightful place along with watercolor, gouache, and
other colored painting media.
A juror's job is rarely easy. It is a matter of selecting the best works of
art from a group of works and often the submitted works are not of the
highest quality. In this case, the best of the works stand out, making the
selection of the top works easy. Developing an exhibition from the remaining
works may be difficult. However, in this exhibition, the quality of the
submissions was very high, making the selection much more difficult. In
many works, the intensity and purity of the color was startling. Consistently,
the works were well designed with strong compositions and the variety of
handling often made th immediate identification of the media difficult. All in
all, works in colored pencil have come of age as evidenced by the quality of
the works in this exhibition.
In this selection process, the problem for the juror was to select the
best of works from a field of very good submissions. The exhibition was
limited by wall space and number of artists so the selection attempted to
include only one work from each artist.
Congratulations on a very fine exhibition and to the success colored
pencil artists are enjoying today.
Ross Merrill
National Gallery of Art