It was a red letter day, writes Don Mackenzie, promising fame at the very least.
My recollection of the details are a little murky but the day's significance is still bright and shiny.
The letter, probably chipped into a marble slab, landed in my letterbox with an ominous thud.
OK, maybe it was a brown paper envelope that arrived anonymously in the company of bills and flyers.
Whatever, it was 1970 and the Otago Art Society had returned my application for artist member with a big fat rejection slip.
As an aspiring young painter I was sure of only one thing.
The amassing number of rejection slips was a certain indication of impending greatness.
I had flirted with rejection from several societies; Southland, Canterbury and Taranaki art societies to name a few.
The Otago crowd was the first to have the opportunity of including me as an artist member.
The whole process had played out like a Le Carre novel.
A secretary on the telephone had instructed me to take several of my works to the basement of a large building in the Octagon.
On a specified evening I would find locker 23 open and I should leave my paintings inside.
In a week's time I was to return to the same locker and retrieve my works.
By that time a jury would have decided whether or not they were the stuff of membership.
I would be informed by mail.
It is often stated in war movies that the waiting was the hardest thing, although surely having your children run over by tanks or limbs being blown off would have been quite hard too!
Well, the day of rejection had arrived and I was driven to the history books for consolation and portents.
The Paris crowd had guffawed at Manet's Luncheon on the Grass in the Salon des Refuses.
Whistler had been accused of "throwing a pot of paint'' into the public's face for his painting The Falling Rocket.
One A. Hitler had gone off to pursue a career in politics after a mauling at the hands of the selection committee for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
Why even my northern nemesis, the Canterbury Art Society, had been "embarrassed'' by its own purchase of Frances Hodgkins' Pleasure Garden, hiding it away until it could be offloaded on to the McDougall Gallery.
A simple rejection letter became a spur onwards and upwards in my painting career.
Oh, I can hear some old diehard society members saying "he hasn't got up to much over the years''.
I would remind them that Grandma Moses painted some of her best works between the ages of 100 and 110.
So out of my way Otago Art Society, I'm coming through, albeit on my Zimmer frame.
- Don Mackenzie is a retired Dunedin school art teacher.
Your best day
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We ask that you don't nominate the day you were married or when a child arrived. But any other day is fine.
