Critique Groups

It can be extremely difficult to get input on your artwork after leaving college. While in the school setting, there are so many more people available to look at works in progress and to offer their advice or interpretations. Later on it is much harder to get such varied input from so many sources and many artists find it easier to either work alone or to work closely with the same people over and over again, which can detrimentally limit input and criticism that they may want or need before showing their work publicly.

There are several ways to combat this. Some artists, such as myself, like to surround themselves with as many people from as many walks of life as possible, belonging to several groups and being actively involved in those groups. Other artists never fully leave the university setting, later becoming professors and faculty and thriving off of that environment. And still others become involved through the Internet, seeking criticism and input globally through online galleries, web-based communities, blogging and more. (I'm not near so involved online because I do too much otherwise, but some such online communities I am aware of include A Singular Creation, My Best Canvas and the St. Louis-based MySLArt.)

Recently, a friend of mine has begun hosting critiques on Facebook that are open to the art group there that I belong to (where we are encouraged to post artworks and other things that we find amazing and inspiring). I have talked about the first of these events before here. It didn't take off to the extent hoped since only three people actively participated (although we had a grand time and got a lot of good feedback, so it was successful for us three). The second has been much more successful with more artists participating, and there is a different group participating with different inputs this time around. The main thing I don't like about this format is not being able to see works in person - sometimes the photographs don't do the artworks justice while at other times the photographs can take on their own presence, overwhelming the work and making it harder to interpret what is really going on. This is especially true of sculptural pieces, installations, subtle artworks and anything prone to glare.

Some groups I am involved with try to offer physical opportunities for artists to get feedback from other members in the group. The St. Louis Chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art has taken to hosting a show-and-tell open critique for members in conjunction with the annual business meeting in November. WCA-STL also encourages members to post any questions and works that they would like criticism on to the blog so that they might get some feedback. And currently, Art Saint Louis is forming critique groups to meet on a regular basis and offer artists a chance to receive input on current and in-progress works. I am looking forward to seeing how it goes and to working with people whom I don't know well, because I know their interpretations can differ greatly from how I perceive things and that they can offer vast insights as a result.