Final Preparations

This morning a small team (me and two other volunteers) did most of the installing of the Belmar and the Railroad show.  We ended up with about 35 pieces, not bad for a very specialized show and relatively short notice.  However, there are still two empty areas.  The big back wall (which last year held my Fourth of July series) will be used to show a computer printed image of the actual mural, at least as it exists now.  And a short section of wall just outside the office will hold two things from the Belmar Historical Society.  On Friday, I met with them and my contact gave me a handful of vintage rail schedules, going back as far as the 1930's.  We have some frames leftover from a project last year, and it was suggested that I use them to show some of this stuff.  An assortment of stuff in the frame was the idea, but with the condition that I couldn't tape or glue anything in place.  After thinking about it for a few days, I got the idea to use strips of the same black construction paper I was given to back it, to make strips of paper that could be folded and wrapped around the back pages of the pamphlets, and then that could be glued to the backing, leaving the original documents untouched.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it museum quality archival, but it will do for this brief show, and the schedules themselves are likely made from inexpensive paper with a bit of acid content.

So I brought all this stuff with me to the Boatworks this morning, figuring I'd use the table space there to put this together, as well as frame a large photo of the somewhat decrepit Belmar train station as it looked in 1986.  However, the frame shop that had produced the frames I was going ot reuse had glued paper to the back, and when I cut that off the first one I found the metal points used to hole the backing in place spontaneously falling our of the frame.  No way to deal with that problem there, so I took it all home again.  I've been mostly using metal kit frames for decades, but once in a while I need to do something in a wood frame and I do have the tools.  Inserting these flat style points is easy enough with a point gun- a magnetized surface holds the points in place, and squeezing the handle drives it into the wood frame.  So after the glue had dried on my assembled schedule collection (above), I put it all back together in the frame (below).  The frame for the single photo was from the same event, but a much better employee must have done that one, because the points were in solid, so I could just bend them up, swap out the content, and then bend them back into place- no gun required.  The building is closed tomorrow, so I'll take them over on Wednesday morning, which is the official opening day, and hang them on their reserved hooks.

In the evening I went out to a kind of art function.  Molly asked me to tell the critique group last week that this Monday she was beginning a series of art history themed lectures at the Spring Lake library, and invited us to come by, hinting that there may be opportunities for us there.  I had never been there before.  It's in a large brick building, which looks like it had been repurposed over the years.  A somewhat convoluted path through rooms, doorways, and stairways finally led me to the upstairs room where Molly was holding her talk.  A very large room, lots of architectural details, a mix of antique furniture, and a nice huge table in the middle, probably bigger than her whole house.  Not surprisingly, it was a senior crowd, about 15 people. She did what she says she does to start her art history semesters, showing her own work to start a discussion about art in general, with dozens of examples of her work laid out.  In the time before the event began she told me about some of the discussions she had with the library people, but I'll save those details until such time as they are closer to happening.