All Good Things Come To an End

The show at Ocean County College was set up about a year ago, and was scheduled to run for the month of December 2016.  While it was still on the walls we received an e-mail from the organizer that we were invited to extend the run into late February.  Don't know if there was a cancellation or if no one else wanted the space, but they had nothing else lined up for early 2017 and the simplest solution was just let us keep our show up on the walls.  With no conflicts, I agreed, as did just about all the other artists in the show.  Scheduled take down day became Tuesday, February 28th, and I wrote that on my calendar.  Last week on the day I work on campus I stopped by the art center box office and verified the plan, leaving my number with the person in charge, in case there was best day/time to come take it down.  The next day I received an e-mail from the organizer requesting that we remove the show any time before February 28th.  I had free time both today and tomorrow, but they are predicting possible rain tomorrow, so the request to move things up a day works out well.  On the way there this morning I stopped at my parents' house and picked up my hand truck, stored in the shed there.  Had other packing materials at home or in my car (including the recently repaired giant Belmar tote bag).

The trip down was uneventful (I commute there once or twice a week for the past decade), but I decided to leave everything in the car and check first.  Took the elevator up from the theater lobby and the first thing I noticed was that my portrait print was missing from the big curved wall.  When I reached the hallway where I had hung all the boardwalk prints I found all my work there, but not much else- only one other artist from our group was still on the walls.  So I went out to my car, got my packing materials, and went back up to the 2nd floor.  When you have materials and a plan, packing is easier than installing, so I had the whole show down and wrapped in less than 10 minutes. Back on the 1st floor I stopped by the office on my way out the door to let them know I had grabbed my stuff, then went to the car.  The repaired Belmar bag easily held all five framed boardwalk prints.

All of the above would make for a pretty busy day, but it wasn't even noon yet, and I expected this would be a double header.  Submissions for the annual show in Belmar will be due in a few days, so I thought I should work toward that.  All my show art was now back in my apartment, so back to my car and drove to the Studio.

My college friends had decided not to come back up to Jersey to see the extended run of the Shore Scenes show, which was perfectly understandable.  If they had come back to Jersey again, the one thing that might have lured them was pizza.  Back in December they hit two classic shore area pizza places on consecutive days, and were impressed that both had eggplant as an available topping for pizza, which I guess still hasn't reached the South.  Didn't have time for a whole meal at either of those classic places today, but in honor of the occasion, I went to the place across the street from the Studio and got a slice to go eggplant parmigiana pizza.

With lunch taken care of, went to work on some art.  When I proofed the latest supermarket block last week I thought it was in pretty good shape, just needed some touch up.  So I did that, removing stray mark bits from the floor, faces, cleaning up the lettering of signs and stuff on the u-boat, and other minor changes.  The second proof of a block always goes easier than the first, but this time I took more time, just because this one will be judged more- so re-inking parts, more careful rubbing.  Results are below.

Originally I had considered producing a second print (reworking a previous block) to submit to the Belmar show, and may yet do so in the next few days.  But this and the show removal had me kind of tired, so I cleaned up and called it a day.