The Whole Point

This blog is about sharing the experience of creating and showing my work. I should include my emotions about my experiences and not just a list of "I am showing here" and "I got rejected there".

The Emotional Truth:

I am nervous about my solo show and how my artwork will be perceived...how I will be percieved as a result. It's like I just woke up out of the fog of creating the work yesterday when Jason Brown and I were hanging all fourteen works from the Huddleston Series.

The realization set in. I had fourteen portraits of dead people. It is not exactly an attractive topic- the whole death thing- and as I was creating the work, I was not dwelling upon morbid perversions. While I spent hours with each portrait, I made up stories about their lives and honored their well earned wrinkles. I was not thinking about their deaths- I was wondering about their lives. Thinking about the strangers I would never know, and hoping that their experiences of life were wonderful while they were with us. I hoped that they had those moments in which they knew that they were loved by the people in their lives.

This is why I am nervous. Viewers typically spend only a few seconds with any given artwork. It is a rarity that an viewer will stand in front of a work for two minutes or more. People often keep walking as they are looking...

Mark Rothko put benches where his work was displayed to encourage the viewer to spend more time in order to experience the work. Smart man.

At first glance, and just perusing through the work the viewers may only see dead people...unlike in the Sixth Sense though. :) I am scared they will miss the opportunity to create their own narratives and miss out on the point of it all.

FILLED WITH ANXIETY...but this is a part of putting oneself out there, right?

First Solo Show Preparations

Painting, painting, painting, and honestly, I have lost track of what number I am on in my series...13? 14? But there is great reason for my neglect of the blog, and spending as much time as possible in the studio-

I am having my first solo show in about 2 weeks!!! The show is going to be at the gallery space at "Pints" in Old Town Portland on October 7, 2010 (First Thursday) and will be on display for the rest of the month. As of right now, the show is being titled "Fragility".

I am extremely excited and there is much to do! Finish the artist statement, mount the hanging hardware to the pieces, catalogue the works, photograph the rest that I haven't photographed yet, plenty of other things that I have not thought of yet, and of course continue to push my painting into fast forward to get as many done as possible for the show. I am loving every minute of this! I am extremely happy to be so busy!

Tomorrow I will be going to a workshop- I'm sure that I will post some info afterwards.

Cheers to Monday Madness beginning again in a couple of days!