It takes a village

Today the plan was to install my art exhibit at Sea Breeze Art Gallery. Being my first solo show it would be appropriate for me to be excited. But on the contrary I awoke apathetic. I was slow to get up and on the road. I did manage to get out of the house and run the necessary errands required to hang the show: Office Depot for tacks & clips; Lowes for brackets & screws. These were needed to install the artwork.

In order to get me where I am suppose to be I make arrangements to meet people at specific times... so I show up. This works 99% of the time. Nobody's perfect. Anyway, I arranged for two friends: Monteve, a mutual resident artist at Sea Breeze & Sonya, owner of Art & Soul Studios to help me with the exhibit.

The concept needed more than two hands. Instead of framing my paintings in conventional frames I used windows demo'd from old houses. This required some rigging in the hanging of the windows so that they didn't fall or tear out the wall with their weight. I was apprehensive about how this was going to happen. But Sonya was able to figure out how to hang the windows with L-brackets.

So Monteve and Sonya showed. Vonder another resident artist wandered in a little later and Monica also a resident artist stopped by even though she was exhausted from work. Sonya's husband Pat came by too... because we needed muscle to drill into the cement wall.

All these people showed up to help me. It makes me a little misty to think about it. I was feeling rather blue when I was alone but once I got in to the process of coordinating the images with the windows with the energy of my friends swirling around, my mood picked up. Sometimes it takes a village.

Everything came together without too many problems. There were a couple of broken screws, a few large holes in the walls and one of the drill bits broke in the cement wall. Everything fixable. I am very pleased with the way the show ended up. There is one window I need to re-arrange but other than that it is all ready for viewing. I did not think I would have everything up in one day. I gave myself 3 days.

And on goes the life of an exhibit...