The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.
— Karsten Harries, author
Thirty-nine paintings were selected by the jury to compete for the winning prize in World Wide Kitsch’s very first painting competition. There were many well crafted paintings and the voting circulated a while on facebook through “liking.”
But competitions are remembered for their winners, and the Chilean painter Sebastian Salvo’s “Self Portrait with Dyspnea” walked away with Jury’s prize this year.
Sebastian Salvo:
To compete is something great. It give us the oportunity to make ourselves better than our ancestors, or at least, to get closer to them than we have ever been before. With this statement, we cannot rest, we just have to get better and better, and that is the difficult way.
For his winning painting, Salvo will receive a locket engraved with the symbolic kitsch butterfly, symbolizing that painters choose painters.
The Norwegian painter, Håvard Løvnes, winner of the facebook voting competition with his painting “Untitled,” will receive a $250 gift card from dickblick.com.
The World Wide Kitsch Competition is an annual competition held for the first time in 2015. Prizes include the Facebook Public Vote Award and Jury’s Choice Award, where the three best submitions are elected.
For more information, please visit the competition page.
Published on Friday, November 20th, 2015