Studio News Updates

I awoke this morning to see air filled with snow, and a coating of the stuff on everything outside.  Temperatures were in the 20's, which normally sounds cold, but compared to the past few days, that meant things were actually warming up.  By late morning the snow had ceased and the sky was brighter. Cleared off my car and my parking spot, then went back inside for lunch and let the sun do the  rest.  I'm not saying that it got warm today, but any place hit by sun was dry by the end of the day.  If I had to, I could have stayed home and worked there, but on a beautiful day like this it made sense to get up to the Studio.  Tomorrow is the intake day for artworks for the next Belmar show, so I needed to get them framed today.  My large train banner tote bag once again served well to help me transport framing related stuff from home to a place where I could spread out and work.

When I first printed up these two food prints, I had been thinking about coloring them, to give them a separate identity from the the original series.  But looking at them for the past week, I couldn't make up my mind how I would color them, so I'm just going to go with the original look.  For frames I had some old ones.  A frame with a white window mat held a similar sized woodcut, so I just swapped my cheesecake image for that one.  Another frame had a similar sized print attached to the surface of a piece of black matboard.  Not archival, but for this show it wouldn't matter.  However, a bigger frame would work better, and while cleaning the basement in Manasquan we found an inexpensive document frame the right size.  Just had to cut a new rectangle of matboard and tape the olives print to it.

While I was up there I had something else to deal with.  For years, the building management has been talking about doing a whole building art show.  It is the Jersey Shore Arts Center after all.  The third floor is now operational, so I guess it's time.  They left fliers under our door earlier this week with the basic schedule, but today I went upstairs and spoke to Brendan about it.  There will be events the final two weekends of February- our art on the walls, plus things like live music, open mic nights, theater previews, refreshments, etc.  I generally have a surplus of framed work in storage, so I can fill as many walls as they want.  There is also talk of a open studio day, which would be fine if I can get Molly to clean up her stuff by then.  I'll post details as we get a little closer.

The other thing that's new this week is that we are trying out a new partner.  Jackie is a painter/pastel artist who had a gallery space/studio in Asbury for years, as well as a store in Ocean Grove.  Molly has been selling silk screened items through her for years.  Toward the end of last year she had expressed an interest in having a place to work for a few days a month, and we agreed on a proportional fee she would pay.  Less than the share Molly and I pay, but then taking up less space than we do, and it will cut our costs.  Molly gave her a key and one day I found the corner near the heater had been rearranged like this.  Different from how we had it, but an efficient use of the space.  Oddly, Molly seemed shocked when she saw it, saying they had never discussed moving anything around.  Well, that was all Molly's stuff, so they can work it out between them.