Dropping Off and Picking Up

Some days the art life is a lot of driving around, dropping off things, picking up things.  Got in some of each today.

The past two years the building where the Studio is held a WinterArts festival, celebrating the artists who work in the building, while also trying to lure people in during the bleak winter season.  Each time a week's worth of events, and the show remained up for months.  Of course, the down side of a winter art festival is dealing with the weather, and each of those past winters we had a lot of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures that kept it from melting, which may have cut into attendance during these events.  Perhaps that's why they skipped the event this year, though as it turned out this was the least snowy winter in quite a few years.   (I'm not complaining)  In the spring it was announced that there would be something different, a show called "This Great Earth", with a nature theme.  Not something I have done much in my career, so I figured I'd skip it, but when I was in the building earlier this week I was begged to submit something.

Looked around when I got home and realized I did have one suitable thing available.  Back around 2000 I produce two prints for a themed show at the Print Council called "Preserving the Garden", which celebrated our then governor's decision to preserve from development half of the untouched land left in New Jersey.   The piece shown above is one of those pieces.  Called Moving Day, a simple portrayal of the effect of rapid development on the wild areas of the state.  The second piece showed a small cornfield being converted to a housing development, based on an actual site not far from my house in that time.  I had shown this piece in one of the WinterArts shows, so I let them know this up front, but I was told it was still desired for this new show, so on a day when it had ceased raining for a few minutes I moved it to my car.  The person in charge of the show wasn't around last time I was there, so I kept it in my car until today, when I finally got word that they did want to include it.  Before going to work on my ongoing coloring project, I got the piece from my car and brought it inside.

With that settled I turned to my ongoing coloring project, but I'll save that story for another post.  With the coloring done, I packed up and headed down to Belmar.  We had gotten word that the show that we had in the nearby corporate space and been picked up and brought back to Belmar, and that we needed to come get our pieces as soon as possible.  What I had in that show was my boardwalk Wheel Game print, so I took advantage of another rare dry day and picked it up and brought it home.

I expect that there will be events linked to this Great Earth show, and when I learn the details I'll post them here.