the meltdown so far

It's just three days until the SK art exhibit officially opens and I am soooooooooooooooooooooo far behind where I should be right now. Nine of the paintings are framed and ready to hang. Nine. Out of 22. The rest are still being photographed and set up for prints and cards. With any luck that is now finished (at 9:30 pm last night it was about halfway done) and I'll be able to pick up the paintings in the next couple of days. Today isn't supposed to be a good day for the photographer, so I'm not counting on doing that today. I have mats and frames for seven or eight of the ones being photographed, so once I get them back I can get those ready to hang pretty quickly. The materials to frame the rest won't even be in until the Thursday before the first reception (the last few pieces were a bit late getting to me), but they should be ready for that.

I don't have any prints or cards of the paintings in the reception yet, although I do have quite a few other cards and a small selection of older prints also. I'm hoping to have at least a couple cards and one print of each of the exhibit paintings by the time of the first reception, but I'm not sure of that. The combination of many of the paintings getting to me a bit later than originally planned and this time of year being both my framer's and photographer/printer's super busy season has really made everything come down to the wire.

I do think (and fervently hope) that not many people will come to see the show in the first few days. I'm thinking most won't come until the first full weekend, so that will give me several days to get everything -- or at least most everything -- finished and ready. I could use another month easily, but since I don't have another month I will get as much as possible done and hope for the best.

The paintings are really cool and they fit the theme well, so if I can just get them all framed and hung it's going to look really good. I just want to do the work justice and with time running out I'm really scrambling.

**update**

I just got an email from Steve that he has five more paintings that can also fit the exhibit. Aaahhhh!!!! Actually, when I think about it these won't be that hard because I have plenty of pieces without them so if come and be worked in that's great and if they can't that's ok too. And I might just have not frame them but make them available for people to see at the second reception and any days I'm there. Kind of an additional perk. Since I like the new work he's doing I'm thrilled he's so prolific right now.

How do you make a duck a soul singer?

You put it in a microwave until it's bill withers.

:D


(really bad joke courtesy of Marty Willson-Piper)



I got to see my very first MWP solo gig (with the Electric Mood Maidens -- the core MMs, Tiare and Davida) this past Saturday night and it was great! A couple of years ago I was pretty much resigned to never seeing any of the Church guys solo so I was absolutely delighted when I saw the Marty tour was coming relatively close to me. I had originally hoped to see at least two or three shows, but that didn't work out and I had to settle for one. Nevertheless that one show worked out perfectly. And I didn't even get lost getting there!! (I found out they did though. lol!)

About a month and a half ago (April 8th to be exact) I got an email from MWP expressing interest in getting some of his artwork made into cards and perhaps prints. We started with the Nightjar and Pegasus images from his most recent cd (cards and prints -- which look fantastic. Very striking pieces.) and then also did a gig poster from a couple of years ago that he drew. The gig poster is especially cool -- I remember thinking (and I swear I wrote somewhere online then too but I can't remember where) that he should make it into a print. Here's the gig poster:



Marty's stuff right now is pen and ink designs and he doesn't send the originals, but rather high res scans which I forward on to my printer who makes them work for the prints and cards. For instance he sent a scan of a sketchbook page which had several designs and we are picking out pieces to make into cards and sometimes prints. With any luck Marty will think a bit about what is need to reproduce any future drawings and will make sure to keep some room between each design he does from now on. I think he will because he seems fairly organised, so that will make it much easier. I'll be interested to see what he comes up with.

Because we started fairly close to the beginning of his US tour and also because it's taking a bit of time to figure out just what could be done with his work (that's actually still going on), it's been a bit of a scramble getting things made up and to him. But it's gone pretty well so far. I had to laugh though because with Steve I try to limit my emails -- both in number and in length -- because he gets overwhelmed when he gets a whole lot of them and I find I get a better response if I only contact him when it's really necessary, plus we only talk on the phone on average once or twice a month. But with MWP I got a flood of emails (many were necessary, but some I had no clue why I got) and once he got to the US he called almost every day. Those calls were fun -- I'll miss them when the US tour is over and I'm not getting them anymore.

The show itself was great and there are a couple of very detailed reviews of it on HW so I won't go into that here. What was most exciting for me is that I didn't get as completely stressed out as I usually do so I was actually able to enjoy the whole thing. I was so nervous before the last Church tour I was very unhappy and had to force myself to even go. Even then I sat in my hotel room before going over to the first venue and cried because I was so wigged out, and although once I got there I was ok I still hardly remember the gig itself. But on Saturday I just drove up, found a parking space, took a few deep breaths, walked to the venue and went in. The bartender told me place wasn't actually opened yet, but I said "oh I have some stuff for the merch table" and waved some flyers I had for SK's art exhibit (Marty had suggested the day before that I make some up and bring them so I wasn't lying), so I got to stay, but I was told to wait right there. MWP and the Mood Maidens (just Tiare and Davida for this show) were doing their soundcheck in the main hall so I was enjoying listening to that. But just a couple of minutes later the opening act guy came to the door and said "are you Holly?" I said yeah and he said "they want you in there" so in I went and the hard part was over. :-)

Everyone was nice and it was really quite relaxed. And an extra cool bit was that Marty noted the SK art exhibit during the gig so that was great. I told Steve about it on Monday when he called to make sure the most recent batch of paintings made it here (we're still a bit wigged out from the loss of that set from earlier this year) and he was quite pleased. It got a good reaction -- a lot of people seemed excited to hear about it.

Some snow pics

The first pic is the view out my front door. The second two are out the back. I had to shovel a path so my whimpy dog would go out into the yard and go potty. The third pic is the path I shoveled across the back deck towards my brother's door. I love all the snow on the chairs. This snow happened on a weekend and I didn't get the car out until Wednesday (for what else but a vet visit -- typical) and I still had to have my brother give me a little push to get my car out. Of course part of that is because it's a very small and light car and couldn't push through the heavy snow and slush (by then it was warm and the snow was melting fast).

One thing this storm will teach me is to keep my stupid mouth shut about how we don't get much winter once February is over here! >:(

eekie saga

It's been an interesting couple months since I last posted a real entry. Some good things, some crappy things, not the worst or best ever and I know many people have it worse, but I've had my troubles dealing with all the various crap in my life lately. I'll post about it over the next several days. Oh joy I hear you say.