Hi everyone!
I received the official email of decline for my painting,
"Apotheoun" yesterday from the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006. It congratulated me for being among the 100 semifinalists, and indicated that all the semifinalists were "ambitious and telling portraits", but in the end there was room for only half of them for the public exhibition that opens July 1. Oh well, that's a humbling letter to receive.
I sincerely want to thank everyone here for the overwhelming enthusiasm, support, and well wishes for the best possible outcome. You don't know how much your support has meant to me through this lengthy competition process!
It will be interesting to see what has been selected when the show opens at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C. It will run through February 18, 2007. Among the reasons I am curious is there must be quite a number of fine, and highly accomplished artists that we don't know about yet. I personally have only just met one other semifinalist, leaving 98 others that are completely mysterious to me. Even the Portrait Society of America has not yet identified another semifinalist from their membership! So who are these yet to be unveiled portrait finalists?
As the other semifinalist I met wrote to me a week ago: "I am looking forward to this portrait show regardless of who is in it. The Brits do such an awesome job with their Ntl [sic] portrait gallery I am hoping this is the beginning of the US equivalent. ". I have to agree. I hope this initial American competition is the genesis of great ones to follow. At any rate, this national portrait painting competition will recycle every three years, with photography and other disciplines represented in between. We should all get another chance at this in 2008/2009.
Again, my sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone for all the incredible enthusistic support! For that, we all deservedly win together as a family!
Garth
Hybrid Mode
