Have you ever considered creating not just a dialogue between the painting and the viewer but also between the paintings themselves?

Whether you show your artwork to curators, interior designers, or potential buyers you want it to snag their attention. When seen individually artworks lose power. One of the drawbacks in competitions is that artists are usually only allowed to enter one work in anyone section. Creating a theme for the exhibition will generally ensure that the body of works hang relatively well together.

However, when an artist is free to enter several works in an exhibition, it’s then possible for them to not only create a dialogue between painting and viewer but also to potentially make a far more powerful statement by creating a dialogue between the paintings.

To achieve this potential, it’s best, whilst creating the exhibition, to display as many of the artworks together as possible and ask yourself these questions:
• Is your art making a powerful statement or have you fallen back on an easy formula you’re fully familiar with, i.e. recipe painting?
• Do the colours and tonal elements enhance your message?
• Are your images iconographic or mundane?
• Which works speak the most powerfully to each other? Do the others fail and why?
• Is there an element of composition, symbol, or iconography that you could have carried through from one image to the other to amplify the message?