art exhibition

How did it come to this…?

The question one asks as one sticks the 56th of 80 greetings cards (and its envelope) into its acetate sleeve, and realises that all the envelopes have been obscuring the card designs.

The question one asks as, juggling one heavy frame and two folders full of delicate unfixed pastels in one hand, and one ill-advised eco-friendly mug of coffee in the other, one’s trapezius threatens to part from one’s spine.

The question one asks as one totes a picture into an exhibition, weighed down physically but buoyant in spirit1, to replace a sold painting, only to find that the customer has brought it back again2, and the precious, precious sales money refunded3.

And so, I drooped off home to drown my sorrows in tea.

Fortunately, a kindly next-door neighbour salvaged my mood by dropping by to deliver some chocolate biscuits as thanks for mowing their lawn while they were away, reminding me that sometimes, pleasant surprises happen too, such as…

Finally, my cartoon featuring the Bricket Wood Art Club exhibition held in the Radlett Centre cafe (hence the inclusion of a tasty sandwich), a mere 5 months ago…

1

After spending the morning chatting to a fellow local artist and admiring their beautiful artwork.

2

This also means that, tragically, my puns of the previous post were wasted, since it was the donkey painting which had been returned.

3

I’m glad to say that Bricket Wood Art Club nonetheless let me hang my replacement picture anyway, since I was on the warm and grumpy side after lugging it in and finding I hadn’t sold anything after all. I then made an ass of myself repeating to the staff all the donkey puns I could think of. Which makes them, of course, hot cross puns.

Bricket Wood Art Club – 2019 August Exhibition

Saturday 10th to Monday 26th August

Whoops. So. This announcement is over a week late now, but at least it’s not as late as my formal announcement of Bricket Wood Art Club’s first exhibition of the year, which finished at the end of March and has as yet received but a throwaway mention in February Update (part 1).

So. Come along to the lovely summer exhibition of Bricket Wood Art Club inside Burston Garden Centre, open from 10am to 6pm1. Entry is free, and there is a restaurant/cafe inside, open until 4pm, which I can attest does a decent cup of tea2.

The address is:
Burston Garden Centre
N Orbital Road
St. Albans
Hertfordshire
AL2 2DS

… Burston Garden Centre has a bit more info on its own webpage here… ooh, and apparently the parking is free too. I tend to forget to mention this, not having a car!3

1

…despite unfortunate and wide-reaching confusion of several stewards… all right, mainly me… which resulted in several people signing up until 5pm, not realising this left the final hour of the exhibition unattended!

2

Not that I spend all my time stewarding chain-drinking cups of tea, you understand.

3

I should probably also mention, not that I’m bragging or anything, that the Hee-Hawe-some painting of a Wonky Donkey at the top of the page was in the exhibition, but has now sold… which I’m very glad of, since it was a Bray-ve Attempt which took Donkey’s Ears to paint… OK, I’m done now.

St Albans Art Society – 2019 Summer Exhibition!

… AKA Mounting problems…

To be fair, the problems this year can mostly be ascribed to Acts of God, and have also mostly been inflicted on other people (a fellow SAAS committee member comes to mind, as does the person I go to for frames who, having received my order, promptly went into hospital with a collapsed lung1.)

However, this does mean that I spent this evening eyeing my newly-framed artwork, with its rather stark white mount glowing against the dingy backdrop of my pastel pictures, thinking….

Hm. Sure wish I’d had time to tint that mount.

In fact, given I’d finished all the artwork going in for this exhibition by the end of May2, it’s amazing how much time drained into the black hole of my life before I actually started getting the framing done. I’m sure there have been psychological studies done on this phenomenon. So sure, in fact, that I decided the best use of my time now would be to create a beautiful pie chart3 about the overheads on producing a piece of artwork4.

Having now tentatively signed up to Instagram as well @TraceysDrawings (#shamelessplug), I fear this overhead will only increase. I’m sure there’s something to be said about working more efficiently but, having spent the last two hours5 waffling on about nothing to do with St Albans Art Society, I shall now finally reiterate/return/wander back to the actual subject of my post, which is:

Come to St Albans Art Society Summer Exhibition!

  • Come to St Albans Art Society Summer Exhibition!
    • Entry is free
    • Open to the public daily from Wednesday 31st July to Saturday 3rd August
    • Time: 10am to 6pm
    • At Upper Dagnall Street Baptist Church Hall, St Albans, AL3 5EE

Further details6, together with a sneak-peak gallery of a few of our exhibits (including mine), are on the St Albans Art Society website.

1

…and still somehow managed to finish the frames. I can happily report they are now up and about again… and their efforts are very much appreciated *bows*.

2

The same cannot be said for the artwork going into the pending Bricket Wood Art Club exhibition at Burston Garden Centre in St Albans, which is due in less than two weeks, for which only four out of five paintings are finished, and for which I as yet have no frames… this is sure to end well.

3

Pie chart as beautiful (and accurate) as fifteen minutes of work could render it.

4

… case in point. NB the so-called ‘Daily Painting’ Challenge was a satisfying exception – but as a result, I now have a backlog of 20-odd paintings to properly process, fix, file and upload to various locations … on top of my previous backlog.

5

Yup, this took two hours. It was adding in the emojis to the pie chart that did it. The explanation for that black-hole effect is becoming clearer…

6

Well… in all honesty, the same details, repeated again.

Berkhamsted Art Exhibition

Just a quick post to plug the local Berkhamsted Art Society Exhibition1, which is running until 5pm this Saturday (18th May2). It is a beautiful exhibition of local artists held in Berkhamsted Civic Centre, open daily from 9am to 5pm.

I was very surprised during my stewarding slot to discover how few visitors the exhibition was getting – considering the attractive venue, the location bang in the centre of Berkhamsted (barely ten minutes walk3 from the nearest railway station), the free tea, coffee and biscuits on offer, and of course the quality of the artwork on display4.

So – do please come and have a look if you’re in the area over the next few days!

190516 Berkhamsted Map

1
Or, as I have affectionately heard it phrased, Berko.

2
And not in fact the 8th of May, which was the date I so cunningly wrote on some blameless visitor’s receipt today…

3
Or – as I discovered dashing for the train home – 4.5 minutes flat-out running with a heavy backpack.

4
Not just mine ;p.

February update (part 1)

All right, yes, it’s March. But only just!1

To prove I’d not only learned nothing from my previous mass-framing escapades, but also had the capacity for new and exciting blunders, this month I had to co-ordinate (within a four-day period):

1)    Picking up unsold work from the Pastel Society2 in London.
2)    Ordering the frame for, picking up, framing, and safely posting a commission *bites nails*3.
3)    Ordering (from a separate place) a frame and mount – and then framing and delivering – two pictures to a local art exhibition courtesy of Bricket Wood Art Club.
4)    Attending an all-day workshop of St Albans Art Society’s by Keith Hornblower… more on this later. It was brilliant, but the workshop – and evening visitors – meant I clearly wasn’t going to get any of #1 to #3 done this day.

So. First issue. There wasn’t a lot of time left before I needed to post #2 (the commission), since it was a birthday present. In fact there was so little time I ultimately had to manage both #1 (collect pastelsoc work) and #2 (collect commission frame) on the same day. Logic dictated that I:

    • Zip to London in the morning to pick up the pastel soc work4.
    • Dump the pastel soc work at home.
    • Zip out again and collect the commission frame before the shop (Artscape in Harpenden) shut for the day at 5:30pm.

A good plan? Why yes. Except I overslept and had no time for step 2. My arms were pretty tired by the end of that day. And of course, due to the cunning location of Artscape (which keeps getting shifted further away from the Town Centre)…

Comic v2 FIN

…it made my arms feel even tireder.

To add insult to injury, I then had to run5 for the train on the way home (with three frames in my folder). Fortunately the running was all downhill. Less fortunately it was muddy. More fortunately again, I did not end up tobogganing downhill on the frames.

Second issue. Yet again, I did not factor in enough slippage time when ordering the frames for #3 (the local art exhibition). There was just over a week of delay after the estimated finishing date – not a huge amount, and hardly unprecedented – but it left me just two days to collect and frame the things. Also it so happened that the one day the frames were available for collection, I was on #4 (the workshop), forcing me to lean heavily on my long-suffering partner to drag the frames home for me (and the groceries. After all, if he’s going to the market anyway he may as well pick up the weekly veg).

However!

This time I did get all the frames and mounts the right size. So maybe I have learned something after all…

1 NB lest you think this post’s image is just a random tree, it is in fact the tree outside the Harpenden Public Halls, through which I walk to reach the awesome shop Artscape (see later whinging within this post). Well… at least there is a connection, however tenuous…

2 If it sounds like I’m name-dropping The Pastel Society into my blog at every opportunity; why yes, yes I am. Look – they even paraphrased me in one of their blog posts: https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/about-us/blog/emerging-artists-pastel-society-exhibition-2019

3 It arrived safely! I was a tad nervous posting it, and therefore smothered the commission in several hundred layers of (probably not strictly necessary) cardboard and bubble wrap. But well, there is no kill like overkill…

4 While concurrently obtaining a bribe of posh tea for my partner in return for him picking up all my other frames on Saturday, when I was away due to #4 (the workshop).

5 All right. More like ‘waddle swiftly’.

Pastel Society Open Exhibition 2019

Woohooo! After many years of trying1, a couple of my pictures have finally snuck past submission and into the Mall Galleries Pastel Society Open Exhibition (2019).

As you can see, after receiving this exciting news I comported myself with great dignity.

With only a smidgeon of ulterior motive2, I would definitely recommend going to see this awesome exhibition, held in Mall Galleries in central London…

  • Exhibition opens: Tuesday 5 February, 10am to 5pm
  • Exhibition closes: Saturday 16 February, 3pm

(And of course further details are given on the Mall Galleries website here).

line1

1As the diagram below illustrates, it is in fact not that many years, but it certainly *feels* long – aside from that one year I got the deadline wrong and missed it entirely…

pastelsoc entry timeline v3

2I wonder how many people I can now spam with invitations…?

You’ve been framed

Harpenden Arts Club is holding its annual exhibition next week1 and – for the first time – I have enough spare artwork floating around to participate.

You know what this means?

A framing nightmare.

Firstly, I have to remember to order the frames. This time, for a change, I remembered to order them but almost forgot to pick them up, culminating in a mad dash into town (followed by a very slow stagger back to the station). I’m sure each frame doesn’t actually weigh several tonnes, but somehow their awkward height – necessitating lifting to around ear level when walking – and their tendency to catch the breeze and passing pedestrians seem to make it so.

Once home and after sensation has returned to my hands, the framing starts.

Are the mounts the right size? Invariably no.

Some contrive to be too small, entailing brutal pruning of the artwork; occasionally more brutal than intended due to poor motor control and a pair of blunt scissors.

Almost worse, of course, is when the mount is just slightly too large, at which point vast quantities of card and tape are employed to try and disguise the fact. This never works, particularly at first.

… @____@…

Time to remove the backboard again, sore fingers quailing at each metal tag2, undo all the tape, redo part of the tape while lying on my back squinting up at two centimetres of mount projecting over the edge of the desk, realise I don’t have enough tape, dash out to buy some more tape, somehow get the new tape stuck on the wrong side of the artwork and spend several fraught minutes peeling it off and whimpering every time the delicate pastel threatens to fall off the desk onto my face, put everything back together again, realise the mount is in places now somehow at a lower level than the picture surface, take off the backboard again and break out the PVA glue…

In short, it ends up like an escapade of Uncle Podger’s in Jerome K Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat’3.

  • Lesson i) Always leave a sizeable border between your actual image and the edge of the paper, because mounts hate everyone.
  • Lesson ii) Also always leave a good length of time – at least 2 weeks – between collecting the frames and having to hand them in for exhibiting, to allow for re-ordering anything (by which I mean mounts) that have gone wrong. Because they will have.
  • Lesson iii) Avoid framing stuff whenever humanly possible.

1Ooh, and one of my owls is in prime position on the slideshow advertising the exhibition ~^^~ #shamelessplug.

2If anyone knows of a painless way to bend back the metal tags holding the backboard in the frame (which does not result in a broken palette knife) please let me know…

3Well, perhaps not quite that entertaining: http://www.literaturepage.com/read/threemeninaboat-19.html