Judging Process for the UKCPS Exhibition

For your information - 

Selection is anonymous and made by three independent judges. Our President Pat Heffer who based  the selection process on the original method instigated by our founder Bob Ebdon is most concerned that anyone should  for one minute consider the process to be biased in any way, so we are explaining exactly what happens to your entries once they are received by Liz Ridley, to allay any concerns.

The judges this year are:
Ann Kullberg - US Coloured Pencil Artist
Steve Pill - Editor, Artists & Illustrators Magazine
Paul Bartlett RBA RBSA - Artist and Full Member of the RBSA.

 The full process is as follows:
1. All entries are received by Liz Ridley who checks that the correct entry fee has been paid, the work has not previously been hung in one of our exhibitions and the entry form has been completed correctly.

2. All pictures are given a number. The judges are sent a spreadsheet with all the pictures listed, giving the picture number, title and size, together with a link to a slideshow where they can view all the pictures with, once again, just the number, title and size, no artist’s name being provided. Thus the whole process is totally anonymous and no artist can be favoured by the judging panel.

3. The judges score each picture marks out of 100. The scores are added together so a perfect picture would score 300. A decision would have already been made by the executive as to how many pictures can be hung at each gallery so the applicable number with the highest score will be selected for exhibition. For example, this year we received approx. 240 pictures for judging and we will be hanging about 80 pictures (dependent on how many are above the cut off score –( it may be 78 or 79) so about a third will be successful.

4. The successful pictures are then linked back to the artists who will be told of the result.

Most societies have only one judge to select the successful pictures and this can therefore give a rather biased result, but using three judges has been shown to give a much more varied exhibition, although it entails a lot more work for the executive member dealing with the entries.
We hope that this explanation has now satisfied our members that the selection process for our Open International Exhibitions is totally fair and unbiased.

Liz Ridley, Treasurer and Exhibition Assistant
Pat Heffer, President