coloring outside the lines

Summer Music School Begins

Three weeks of Summer Music School are upon us.  It will be a a frenzy of picture taking and the production of our annual slideshow for the parents on the last day.  This is always hectic, inspiring, and incredibly fun. 

Enhancing Images on the Copy Machine

The official reason for our trip to the copy shop yesterday was not, as you might have supposed, to take great butt pictures.  We had met John's former art teacher for breakfast in the little family restaurant next door to the Kwik Kopy.  Our mission was to make the final selection of 4 pictures John would enter in the national Juried Exhibit for Young Artist's with Disabilities.  In the end we agreed to put all our eggs in one visual basket and use 4 strong black and white photo images.

Now the question is whether the images will stand on their own or if playing with them might yield  more interesting results.  We went to the copy shop to experiment with the photo images, blowing them up, or selecting only certain sections to pixelate at high resolution, or reducing the image.  After an hour or so of happily playing on their equipment, we had 26 interesting versions of the original very stark, pristine digital shots.

We have a few weeks to try various combinations.  It is a very interesting process.

Best Summer Butt

Seen in the local copy shop on this summer, Saturday morning.

Mom and Pop Stores

In a recent dust off of my desk I found some old computer disks and on them some pictures of our downtown taken in the good old days of our Sony Mavica, when we were early digital adopters and life was still in the slow lane.

I had a couple of packets of card stock put away for just such an occasion and a frighteningly low ink supply.  Saying to myself that I would print out a few cards until the old HP inkwell ran dry, I set about my trip down memory lane.

A while later I put away twenty cards, each a tribute to a mom and pop store no longer with us in our rush to revitalize our downtown and get a Wal Mart up the road a piece. I sometimes wonder what the tourists we hope to attract are going to see here, when we have been cloned to look like every other place along the road.

William A. Greaves Portraits

The William A. Greaves (1847-1900 ) portrait of Thomas Struthers, which always hangs above the spiral staircase in the Wetmore Gallery of the Warren Public Library, has now been joined by 25 other portraits and one landscape painting by this artist for the first known public showing of his works in over one hundred years. The exhibit, Good Company: 19th Century Portraits of Warren Artist William A. Greaves 1847-1900 is written about more extensively at this link.

We attended the opening of the exhibit last evening.  Kevin Gleason from ConservArt of Williamsville, NY, a partner in the firm which has worked to bring two of the library's portraits back to good repair, spoke on the conservation and preservation of fine art.

It was our good fortune to attend the show with our neighbor, an octogenarian, who had loaned the portrait of her grandmother to the exhibit.  He grandmother, fortunately, has not been relegated to either attic or basement and remains in excellent condition.  She is wearing a heavy gold pin with a ruby center, which for some reason Mr. Greaves chose to paint as a pearl.  The pin is still in the possession of my neighbor.

This same neighbor also pointed out a fine looking fellow on the wall, who shares his name with the street where I live.  She pointed out this is not coincidental, as he resided here.  His house, has since disappeared.

It is quite wonderful to live in a small town, where history is personal and we are blessed with an excellent library staff.  They have located the 27 examples of Greaves work in the show and an additional 13 portraits at various locations.  They intend to forward this information to the Smithsonian, which I believe has two Greaves portraits in their collection.

Obstacles to Participation II

Two people working in the social services field kindly forwarded an email to us this week.  It is a call for submissions for a national Juried Exhibit for Young Artists with Disabilities.  It is sponsored by VSA Arts with generous assistance from Volkswagen of America, Inc.

VSA arts is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1974 by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to create a society where all people with disabilities learn through, participate in and enjoy the arts.

Why have I mentioned this in a post on obstacles to participation. I am not a total ingrate.  This is a wonderful opportunity and we plan to submit John's work in the competition. Yet this requires the submission of an artists narrative of 2500 characters and a personal statement of 350 characters.  It also requires the art to be submitted in jpeg format with very stingent, technical requirements.  My first comment was, "Do they expect every person with a disability to come with a technical advisor?"  Then I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Well John does.  His co-guardian is an IT professional and if it can be done he will know how to do it."

After mentally assuring myself that we could, using the term loosely, meet the computer requirements of the submission process, I fired off an email to John's former art teacher.  We are meeting for lunch tomorrow to look at his work and see what he might be best advised to enter. I am telling myself, rightly or wrongly, that when I purchase Ralph Lauren clothes I should not really kid myself into thinking Ralph sat and sewed the buttons on personally.

Obstacles to Participation

So often when John exhibits his artwork or we talk about it, someone will say, "John did that?"  There is genuine wonderment that John has taken a sincerely effective photograph or produced an interesting drawing.  I invariably mutter under my breath, "There's nothing wrong with his eyesight."

I have come to realize we are approaching his accomplishment from opposing directions. Others are aware that they do not often see even such a mundane accomplishment from someone with so obvious a disability. I realize that there may be untold numbers of persons with disabilities with the ability to express themselves in creative and interesting ways, who remain unknown.

Increasingly I have come to see that the barriers to participation are often invisible. For persons with certain disabilities it is the small, seemingly inconsequential steps along the way that are the tripping points.  The taking of the photographs and having them matted and framed is only a small portion of what it takes to exhibit in a show. It is reading the printed entrance requirements, it is submitting the entrance fee, it is filling out the artist's biography on the entrance form, it is finding transportation to take your photographs to the gallery and again to collect them at the end of the show, it is the need to be there for the opening to enjoy the comments and interaction with others that are impossible to do on your own, not the actual work of creation.

To you the surprise is the creative effort.  To me the wonderment is that someone with an IQ of 63, a limited ability to understand financial transactions, read and write, has managed with assistance to be standing beside his work talking, haltingly, with other artists and community members.

And A Commission

Today the exhibit at the library was taken down. I felt it was a good time to do a final tally. 

John about broke even, if we are looking at out of pocket expense.  In an earlier post I said our costs to enter the show were $36.00. John sold one photograph priced at $45.  If we add in the 15% gallery fee we are at $42.75.  We are excluding the cost of producing the work, framing and matting.  Not quite so even then.

Then there are the intangible benefits, which if we are honest, are priceless.  Many young men with mental retardation are outsiders looking in.  The act of being included and welcomed into a group is an enormous gift. To go places and be recognized for your work and to have people compliment you on your ability is also an incomparable reward.  It is, as always, an opportunity for me to marvel at the generosity of people.  When we went up to the gallery to leave a photo for the artist's sketch book, a woman we know complimented John on his matting, which we had done professionally.  She recognized, as we do, that matting costs add up rapidly.  She has the equipment to produce her own mats and offered to do John's for him. That's huge!

There was the phone call from out of the blue this morning.  We had discussed some time ago photographing a mural for a friend and as these things go, we never quite connected. This morning John was offered a commission to do these photographs and also a photograph of the daughter.

Life has a way of working out.

Works on Exhibit

The show comes down after this weekend and so I leave you with a few pictures taken while we proctored the other night. 

I am going to be spending the next few days preparing to celebrate a friend's 90th birthday.

Lighting

We would not ever if we were in our right minds sign up to proctor for a four hour stretch at an art show. However, through a series of misadventures this became our assignment last night.  It had the virtue of getting done in one trip what would have been two two-hour commitments. With  little enthusiasm, I headed out with my son, to spend what was pretty certain to be a slow, rainy evening at the local library. So, what did we learn from this adventure in tedium?

Amazingly, quite a lot. We were told even before we had a chance to see the little red sticker now covering the price, that one of John's photographs had been sold. I had checked about one week into the exhibit, hoping to come home with good news for John.  At that time only three works had been purchased, and none of them John's. What a difference another week had made.  Little red stickers now peppered the room and I would guess 15 or 20 works have now found new homes.

Four hours also offered me the chance to reflect on two things; viewing distance and lighting.  I realized I do what everyone who visited the show did.  I stand parallel to the wall, quite close to the works and inch my way along.  It is probably the only time I am ever going to see works in this way.  If I buy one and take it home, unless I hang it in a hallway, it is more apt to be viewed hanging over a piece of furniture or seen more peripherally as I walk through an area.  Also, seeing one of John's work hanging above eye level and two below changed the viewing experience. Sitting at the back of the room at the proctor's desk, I decided many of the works benefited from taking a longer view.

What I would never have expected and really the item the artist had even less control over than the hanging of the exhibit, was the difference the lighting in the room made over the course of the evening. This was a surprise since the room has only minimal light from outside; several rows of opaque glass bricks at ceiling height on one wall. The rest of the room is well lit by track lighting. Yet there were three large paintings on the back wall, the most expensive items in the show ranging in price from $900 to $2500, that changed very perceptibly as the evening progressed. 

To not put too delicate a point on it, I had returned to the show the second time to see what had been sold and also to take another look at these very paintings.  I didn't get it.  They looked amateurish and the price seemed more ego than reality induced.  Then about 8:00 pm last night, it started to pour outside, something in the quality of the light changed and as I turned around it was as if I had never seen these painting before.  I could see what the artists had been trying to achieve and until that moment, I thought, had eluded them. There may have still been a bit of ego in the price for a small town show, but there was also a lot more value than had been apparent.

The last observation I will share is this; group shows, mounted by local artists with varying levels of expertise, offer the art lover a wonderful opportunity purchase very nice works at affordable prices.  My personal opinion is that before I would spend in the $1,000 and up category I would want to think twice. However, most of the works were priced between $50 and $150. and if ego might have inflated some prices there were, I would hazard, more prices that were affixed very cautiously and with more love of having the opportunity to exhibit than any thought of personal gain. There is also a special joy in supporting art in your community and in knowing the artist.