Excellent Weekend!

House with Pink Hedge, 2006, Oil on Panel, 6x6









First I'd like to point out how utterly lame I am. Doug and I went to the opening at Anderson-Soule Gallery Friday night and despite the fact that I actually carried my camera in my hand to the event, I completely forgot to take any pictures whatsoever. Sheesh! I specifically intended to take a few shots for the blog, since I have forgotten to do so at almost every other opening I have attended since I started this blog. Doug may also qualify as lame since I had asked him to take pictures and he also forgot about it. We are just magical together. heh.

Anyway, the opening was very nice. We arrived just before 6pm (it had started at 5pm) and there were already a lot of people there and it was downright crowded the rest of the evening. Doug and I spent a lot of time talking with Richard Gombar, the artist who also participated in the other show, Old Barns/New Perspectives. He and I spent some time comparing art notes (one of my favorite things when I talk to other artists) about our little gallery scene, our studios and family life. Turns out that he and Doug have the same dorky sense of humor and so I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes at them. It was interesting to see my work again. It had been two months since I had sent it off to the gallery and so it felt as if I was seeing old friends, a lovely experience and a nice surprise about how good they still look. In fact, as we were approaching the gallery, I could see a painting that looked really interesting and that was the first one I went to look at when we got inside. It turned out to be one of mine and I felt silly about forgetting my old friend! Well, it was that and I probably need a new prescription for my glasses also. A few of the pieces in the show had sold, including one of mine. So that was a nice surprise too.

We stayed in Concord and the next morning, decided to drive to Portsmouth, as neither of us had ever been there. It was so great! We spent all afternoon walking around and visiting all of the little shops and galleries in the downtown area. We came across two galleries that had some interesting work and in fact one of them, Nahcotta, was a gallery that I had submitted my work to a few years ago (got a very polite no) and I was excited to see some work by a few of their artists (MJ Blanchette and Tim Beavis) that I had admired online. The other gallery, Three Graces, had some work by a painter, Brian Chu whose work we really liked. It was kind van Gogh-ish, the paint was very thick and directional but the images seemed more abstract (in person, somehow, they looked more abstract than they do in the reproductions-interesting quality, I'd say!) and the colors were fairly subtle. We came across a hotel within walking distance of all of this and decided to stay another night and so we checked in and then kept on shopping. It was nice to see so much merchandise, in person. I do so much of my shopping online these days, because there are so few stores (it's all baseball tourist crap mostly) where we live and so I really enjoyed this. Doug HATES shopping, some of our biggest arguments have happened in stores-he gets all tense and then I get mad because he is sucking all of the fun out of my very favorite thing (spending money) and then we argue/ignore each other, but this time he held it together really well and we had a great time. We also came across a really great shoe store and we both bought shoes. They can be kind of tricky to buy mail-order so this was pretty exciting to us upstate farm folks to be buying shoes in a real store. Yee-haw!

Despite the fact that there were tons of really good restaurants in Portsmouth, we ended up staying in the hotel for the evening, as neither of us felt like going out again. We ordered a really good pizza from room service and watched Little Miss Sunshine, which I highly recommend, by the way. It was excellent, funny and quirky and painful all at the same time. We drove back home on Sunday and got back in time to enjoy the fabulous dinner that our sitter, Mary Jo and our kids had prepared.

No more post show meltdowns for me anymore. Today I have to get it together and start getting some work finished (I have not been particularly productive the last few weeks)! I also need to take some time each day to get some exercise-which is one of the things I have neglected with my busy schedule this last year and boy, I am I feeling the effects of that! So I am off for a long walk and will then spend the rest of the day painting.