Well the weekend and the week so far have been so full and fulfilling for art that I have only now found the time to write about it. The biggest story was of course Martha’s Dancing/Painting live at the NUART Gallery over the weekend.
Friday was spent in preparation for the next day’s event. This entailed everything from getting white foam core board for the poster I had picked up detailing the history of Martha’s art and community activities and accolades from both California and Washington to making final cut decisions on what art to take with us on Saturday and dropping off art and the posters and boards to be mounted at the gallery. Whew! Then it was writing blogs and watching Martha try on outfits that she might wear while danc ing and painting the next day… that part was fun.
All of that done, it was up early on Saturday in order to have time to load up even more art and then set up the show and which included wine, food and other refreshments and get the stereo set up so Martha would have the Latin music she needed to do her Dancing/Painting to. Even before Martha got there and while Gary Doan, the owner of NUART Gallery, and I were setting up, people were coming by and asking for Martha. They had most likely seen the pictures and story on the front page of the GO! section of the Wenatchee World on Thursday.
Lots of people came all day long. We were both very pleased that representatives from the World and The Good Life came by and chatted it up a bit with Martha. Other folks that we knew stopped by to visit and enjoy the show and the art and we met new folks and made new friends as well. It was really great to see the crowd swell at times. It was particularly interesting to see the number of young people including teen agers who gathered outside the gallery to watch through the front window. Others really took the time to stop and read the articles and look at the photos on the poster board at the entrance to the gallery. Some even took pictures of the posters. 
I of course, took lots of pictures and video from which I posted a video on Youtube…. more on that later. Martha was the star of the show and she had a ball dancing and painting not only from 11am till 3pm as planned but continued on till almost 4pm so as to finish the third painting she did that day. I was so glad to see not only the numbers of people who came into the store and looked at all the art - not just Martha’s, but some of whom took art home with them. Yeah! A good day for all.
The next day I spent beaucoup hours putting together a movie of the Martha the Dancing Artist and no sooner started uploading it to Youtube when it was time to head out to the Cashmere Arts and Activities Center Gallery to help change out the art for the December show. When I stopped to show Artie and Sandra at CAAC the video on Youtube…. it wasn’t there. Arrrgh! It must have had a glitch I assumed.
After Martha and I returned home from dinner with some good friends, I was able to get back to the video only to find that it was unsalvageable. I couldn’t even save it as a movie on my hard drive. It had too many “errors” to the code at that point…. very disappointing. I could only surmise that I had cut and hacked up the video bits so many times getting it down from 48 minutes to just over 8 minutes with sound overlays and more editing after adding the overlays that the underlying computer code got mangled.
Monday morning even though it was a work day for me, I got up bright and early and remade the video. This time I did it better and more efficiently… knowing what bits I wanted to use already I just added those in, thus minimizing the amount of editing to be done in the movie making program. I even made it shorter yet, by tightening up the bits limiting the use of stills and cutting out most of the video of Martha painting the third painting of the day. This time it was a tight little 6 minute movie that uploaded to Youtube without a hitch. It’s a lot of fun to watch and can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qGR5qiAB7E&feature=channel_video_title
The week has so far involved firing many bisque and glazed figures for Martha’s students at the emergency housing program and ‘helping’ Martha with her new larger family themed sculpture for the new Quincy Library, installing art and taking photos at the Two Rivers Gallery for their December show and picking up art from Terry Johnsons Studio for our upcoming Home Art Sale this Saturday and Sunday here at our house.
I was so happy to find that some folks had purchased some of my cards at Terry’s and while I was there carrying out the last two of my photos someone came by, saw and fell in love with my large framed Tulip photo and just had to have it…. Yeah! It found it’s ‘forever home’. And, of course Martha is working on some new paintins for her upcoming show at Two Rivers Gallery which will be in March and April. I really can't wait for that.
Well, enough for now and lets all have a very artful day.
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment