Back in the day when I was stretching as many grilled cheese sandwiches out of a paycheck as the law would allow, I took a chance on entering one of my pieces into a show called the Schoharie County National Small Print and Drawing Exhibition in Chautauqua, New York. To enter the exhibition, I needed to send in a labelled 35mm slide, making sure the piece was under 200 square inches (thus the word small). Off in the mail went the slide labelled Grape Waffles and Five Irons, one of the first pieces that came out of my child drawing series I had begun that year.
Fast forward a couple of weeks: I open a letter congratulating me on being accepted into the show, with a caveat in small letters that said, “…provided the actual piece matches the slide image.” Ok, no problem, I thought. However, when I went over to my storage cabinet and pulled out the actual piece, I realize it was four times bigger than what I had said it was when I labelled the slide and sent it off to be reviewed. No kidding! My heart sunk, I’m a buffoon, the cow jumped into the moon. And I thought of jumping off a bridge for my epic fail.
What I had done was send in a slide without checking the dimensions of my actual piece, a piece that had passed a preliminary slide review at a national competition judged by none other than Ivan Karp, the owner and manager of the prestigious OK Harris Gallery in New York. Realizing my mistake was one of those moments of disbelief where my brain had an out of body experience on a busy street corner with a homeless sign.
Then I had an AHA! moment. Or, given the circumstances, maybe the moment was…OK!
What would happen if I could somehow copy the original so that it met the size requirements? Hmmmm.
First and worst, Grape Waffles and Five Irons was drawn on a sheet of handmade paper, not something easily replicated. Fortunately, I had a bit of the original paper pulp left in the blender, just enough to cast another sheet (yes, that was back in the day when I was making sheets in Bender’s blender). Next, I borrowed an overhead projector (this was 1984) that allowed me to scale down the piece onto the new sheet, and lightly outline the main shapes and lines. After a few final color touches and some blind skill, a wish and a prayer, and three cups of really bad coffee, VOILA! I packaged and sent the piece off to the New York, hoping Mr. Karp would not check it too carefully against the original slide. Ok, so far so good.
It worked. I received a Best of Show award, and five hundred dollars, mainly because I had refused to be defeated by my own carelessness. I had had a bad moment, not a bad career. At that time the prize was enough money for me to buy my own coffee machine, a new Bender’s blender and a math tutor that helped me understand what “square inches” means.
Art lesson for the day: Don’t give up. You never know when you are only a few square inches shy of success. Try it a new way, even it feels like you are working backwards. You may just turn an epic failure into a Best-of-Something-Award. That may turn out to be more than just OK.