Chicago Art Adventure
Well wow, today was cool. It had been years since I’d last shown my paintings, but today I got to do just that. And, I even got to do so from the comfort of my own living room! Sure, it’s a little weird rearranging your home for an artwalk, but I have to say that overall today was just great. I loved being able to move art into it’s show space on my own schedule. I loved being able to keep white wine chilled in the fridge and bring it out throughout the heat of the day today. I loved getting to know my neighbors. It wasn’t a big day for sales, mostly people just bought postcards, but I did get some interest in possible future sales, one of which I think will happen in the next week or two. So that’s really cool.
I used to be very wary of ever selling my work. Now I love it. There is nothing more motivating to create more work than the empty space left on your wall from where someone has bought something. Sure, the capitalism angle can be hard to take, and putting price tags on your pieces can be agonizing, but in the end, after your prices have been decided, when someone says they’ll take something and you know they’re really going to like it, it’s just a really great thing.
And honestly, I just have to say I was very pleased at how much of the living room conversion to a gallery came so naturally. I think I may have underestimated so many years of showing at the Brewery Artwalk back in LA in group settings. I guess I didn’t realize just how much I’d learned from those experiences, especially never having been in charge myself. But I have to say, I felt on top of this. Part of that was just good synchronicitous timing. And choosing to only show paintings certainly simplified things over all. No printing rushes, no last minute framing, all I had to do was move the paintings I wanted to show into the living room, and clear out the things I didn’t want in there for the show. In the end, there were fifteen of them up on the walls. Then I moved a curtain to set the space of where I wanted people to be, set up a little table with cards, postcards, snacks and an email sign-up sheet and voila, instant gallery! I even happened to have a perfectly sized art board piece left over from past projects to make a sign out of and some fancy lights to lead people toward my door as the sun went down.
It’s really been a lovely day.
And because I’m still in show mode, here is a link to the gallery where I have every painting I’ve finished in the last decade posted. Tree #5 is brand new and was created pretty much just for the show. As it turns out, desolate little dried up trees are far more popular in sunny Los Angeles than here where people suffer an actual winter, but I’m happy to have made it just the same. Feel free to peruse.
http://snapshotgenius.com/paint/
