Endings and Beginnings

My show came down last Monday, without too much stress.  Thanks to my husband Pete for his support; having taken the day off work he lugged stuff pretty much all day because once we got everything home and safely stowed, we then took lots of storage units out to my studio.  Well, I had to make the most of his strength and his car.  That's another bit of space cleared at home, just got to spend some time putting it all back together out at the studio now.

Thanks also to Albert and Geoff, volunteers at Ryedale Folk Museum, who took down the smaller works and turned all the mirror plates round for me.

Partly wrapped History Painting in the foreground Geoff, centre and Albert, right.

Remember these?

I spent a happy evening this week, going through all these floppy discs and downloading the info I wanted to keep onto my computer.  Fortunately the portable floppy reader that Pete bought me years ago, which was still in its packaging, worked!  They contain lots of images of student work and most of the documents I made during my 10 years of teaching at Queen Mary's College, Basingstoke, one of the largest sixth form colleges in the country.  Needless to say, some of the floppies were corrupted after so long and wouldn't read but I think I have enough information.

The reason I need the images is for some research I am doing as part of a proposal I am writing.  For once I have started early on the task and I am hoping that I will at least be interviewed.

Meanwhile, I have sold two more of the pieces that were in my browser and it looks like I have sold one of the small drawings that were in the show, so my tally for the exhibition is: 1 canvas, 1 framed drawing, 4 pieces from the browser.  I think this is quite a respectable number of sales for my first solo show given the current economic climate and I am very pleased with the response my work has had from everyone that saw it.  I photocopied the sheets of comments that the public filled in and I will transcribe them and file them in my evidence log along with the emails I received. 

Now I am going to start to look for new galleries suitable for showing my work, making the prints and artists' books I keep talking about and developing some new ideas that came to me yesterday.  The new ideas would look great as huge paintings. . . . after all I have said about keeping small for the next body of work.  Sigh.

I'm going up to Glasgow at the end of this month to see Chris Thomas, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-d-thomas/17/800/250 ,who is studying for his MA in Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art.  He has a group show upcoming, which I am looking forward to seeing and we are going to go round the galleries, so who knows, I may make some useful contacts!