Petaluma Art Center

Recently I had the pleasure of judging an art show for Petaluma Art Center from the comfort of my studio here in Maui. The process was done through Smarter Entry, a website that manages the jurying process. Artist submitted their work to the Petaluma Art Center through Smarter Entry's website. Once the deadline was met, the judges ( 3 of us ) were contacted to begin the process. The first phase was the elimination process. 400 images were entered into the show and each judge could only keep 40. We had three opportunities to accept or eliminate images. The first pass through allowed me to get comfortable with their system. I didn't eliminate very many images, maybe 30, the first round. The ones I did eliminate were the badly photographed, out of focus, hard to see images. The next round was a bit harder. I knew I needed to get the count down to 40. With 370 images left to view, it proved to be pretty challenging. I managed to get it down to about 150. The third and last round was the hardest. Knowing I could only accept 40 images total, cutting out 110 all great art was tough. I went back and fourth over each remaining image, some of them where paintings, some were sculptures, some textile art and some wood carvings. After hours of deliberation, I managed to reach my 40 images. I then had to wait for the other two judges to complete this process before moving onto the next phase. Remember I said each judge could only accept 40 images each. So some of the images I rejected made it through. 67 images made the cut.

Phase two was the rating process. Each image had to get a number rating of 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9. The Highest number was the juror's choice for best of show. This was another tough challenge for me. I stated out rating the images that I had rejected but the other judges accepted. Once I was comfortable with hoe the system worked in this phase I got to work on the remaining 50+ images. It took about 4 hours to rate all the images. Once I finished I went back through each one to see if I changed my mind on my first rating. That took another hour. Once I was satisfied with my choices I hit the "Done Rating Button".

The show will start May 14th and runs through July 10th. If you are in or around the Petaluma California area, stop in to see the show and let me know what you think. I won't be traveling to the area myself and will miss it. I'm really excited to hear who won!