Rejected Artwork Finds a Home of its Own: Dazed and Refused [Gallery]
What do you do if, after putting blood, sweat, tears, paint and a fair bit of your heart and soul into the portrait you’re painting, it gets refused from the BP National Portrait Competition? Put your head in your hands and cry? Give up painting forever and take up pottery classes? Cut your ear off?
If you’re lucky, you might bump into the creators of Dazed and Refused, who offered those rejected from the somewhat strict guidelines of the National Portrait Competition an opportunity to exhibit and sell their work in a far more interesting and bohemian environment.
2445 artists will be displaying their rejected portraits at London’s Arch Gallery, marking the second year of this ingenious exhibition. Most paintings are for sale at prices between £300-£15,000, and many (us included) would claim that the huge range of artists involved and subjects tackled in Dazed and Refused actually creates a far more varied, representative and insightful body of work that the “official” competition, anyway. Long live the rejects.
