Busy Day in Belmar

Today was the annual Art Walk in Belmar, an occasion for local artists to set up all around the downtown area, demonstrating their skills and possibly selling their art.  Since at the moment I am attempting to run my local woodcut class again, I figure self promotion is not a bad thing.  The event had been run by a private business for years, but a few years ago it was handed to the Belmar Arts Council to organize.  They offered me a slot inside, in our building, which is generally better than exhibiting outdoors, and like I said, I have a class to promote.

My shift was scheduled to begin at noon, and I was there on time.  But before I could set up for my demonstration I had to deal with something else first.  Besides running the Art Walk, we are often invited to run a lot of other arts events and/or to provide artists and artworks.  For example, last year we handled a show for Spring Lake, held in their Library/Theater building.  Today I was dropping off work for another.  Many corporations run art galleries- years ago the Printmaking Council had a deal with one such local (to them) space where we provided shows (traveling ones we had held in our gallery) and they donated to the group for each one.  Apparently New Jersey Resources (large energy conglomerate) has been inviting us for years to put together a show and we finally agreed.  I'm usually not crazy about these corporate campus things, but, again, promotion.  There will be no reception, though I am told it is open to the public during business hours.  When I find out more, I'll share the info, as well as see the show itself.  (my town, should be easy to get to) Today was the deadline for dropping off work in Belmar, which organizers will be installing soon.

As far as the Art Walk- I had the opportunity to recruit people for my next attempt at a woodcut class, as well as a need to produce a new print.  One of their summer theme shows in Belmar will be about birds, but works must be more recent than any of the bird subject prints I have.  I had considered reworking an old saint print, since so many of those blocks were destroyed by Sandy, and had even picked out a possibility, and then a new niece was born this week.  Nothing under her name in my main resource, but my brother tells me there's info on the internet.  I'll want to get more verification before I make this print officially part of the set, but I can still make them a print.

An internet search did turn up a Saint Georgia (my new niece's name) but very little else.  Maybe she's one of the many saints canonized by John Paul II, too recent for the books.  Most of the websites that list her just give the name and feast day (Feb 15) but no stories.  The one page that did provide a story mentioned that during her funeral, birds followed the procession through town and settled on the roof of the church for the length of the funeral.  It's the kind of story I would work with anyway, even if I didn't have a need for another bird themed print, but this will kill two birds with one stone (so to speak), maybe three if you throw in the need to promote the class.  Over the past few days I came up with a plan, gathered resource material, and during my Art Walk shift I started drawing.  My idea is a church roof with doves (the bird from the story) all over the roof.  I selected a church from one of my many art history books, had images of doves from wild life books, and started sketching.  The one thing I didn't have was a decent pencil, just some mini-golf pencils left over from what we use for classroom evaluations, but it was enough to start the sketch.  Needs a lot more content, but at least I got it started.