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SYP Part 4

Hanging Day

We were not able to get into the gallery until the coordinator arrived at mid-day and we spent the next six hours getting everything up on the walls and setting up the reception desk. The gallery uses the STAT hanging system and was able to provide heavy duty cables for my long MDF pieces, so the potential weight problem was avoided.

The gallery is a ‘white cube’ with plenty of light overlooking the beach and is a really nice venue for our exhibition. We had decided on our hanging plan beforehand and things worked out really well. One decision we made when we saw the room was that we would keep the centre of the room empty and not put the print browsers or anything else in the centre. This worked very well in keeping a sense of space and light in the exhibition and it gave visitors space to stand back and look at the works from a distance. 

Starting to hang the works. The unused plinths were later stored away.

Linda had the brainwave of writing the names of the artworks on masking tape attached to the bubble wrap which saved us a lot of time when packing up.

One slight hiccup was that I hadn’t been aware of the change in wall height at one end of the gallery which meant I couldn’t keep everything aligned along the whole length of the wall but I felt that if I had lowered things to fit the lower portion they would not have looked right on the higher wall.  A second slight hiccup occurred when we hung Linda’s large framed photographs and two of them slipped in the frames due to the archival tape not sticking well enough which required a dismantling and re-framing early the next morning.

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SYP Part 4

Last Minute – ‘Alarums and Excursions’

The last few days before we were due to travel to Aldeburgh brought frenetic activity and not a few panics. Fingers were crossed as some of the printing timescales were going to be tight and it was very clear that we were going to have to make at least two trips in the car to get everything to Aldeburgh. We had booked our accommodation to start a few days before the start date of the exhibition and this proved to be vital in sorting out the logistics. 

One thing that I wanted to do before the exhibition was to get my paintings professionally photographed to allow for prints to be made at a future date. I had arranged to take the paintings to ‘Little Pink Cloud Limited’ https://littlepinkcloud.com however the person making the booking hadn’t remembered that there was an extra bank holiday for the coronation and so had to delay the session for later in the week, making things very tight for packing up for transport.

Having three bank holidays in the same month caused all sorts of problems with scheduling and it became touch and go as to whether the catalogues would be printed in time. Part of the problem was that we weren’t able to guarantee what space we would have in the entrance hall of the gallery if there was a late booking of the large upstairs gallery room. We didn’t get the final all-clear until the week before our booking and as this impacted on our catalogue this was another source of stress. 

The greetings cards printing was done by SixPrint http://www.sixprint.co.uk/Greeting-card-printing.html who specialise in greetings cards and who offer mixed design pricing on their print runs. This is a great bonus as it allowed Linda and I to get a large number of different designs done with 12 cards of each design at a much cheaper price. They are also very good quality cards and the company supports the Woodland Trust and is carbon neutral etc. The cards turned up two days before we were due to leave and we then had to set about folding, inserting envelopes and putting into the cellophane wraps and sealing for over 500 cards. Family were drafted in!

As well as the eight-page catalogues we also had to get the A2 posters printed together with business cards, these were all done by a local printing company which meant that we were able to pick things up rather than wait for postal deliveries. 

The poster is a combination of part of my Wave painting and Linda’s photograph of The Walker on the Beach. This seemed to work well and we had good feedback about it.

The catalogue we decided would be an 8 page A4 booklet and the printers have a minimum order for booklets of 200.

Front cover – page 1

Inside pages 2+3

Inside pages 4+5

Inside pages 6+7

Rear cover page 8

Business card front and rear (QR code takes you to my website)

Finally we had to wait for delivery of the card readers for our business accounts and set these up, these proved to be vital in terms of making sales as people don’t seem to carry cash these days and even greetings card sales were usually done either using bank cards or phones. We used SumUp as they offer a free business account when you purchase their card readers with no monthly fees and only charge about 1.5% transaction fee. Their readers also have built in sim cards to allow usage where there is no wifi. 

Thankfully all the last-minute issues were sorted and we were able to put the exhibition together as planned.

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SYP Part 4

Arrangements and Publicity 

Having designed our poster it has been sent to the gallery and they are pleased with it. It will be distributed to the publications in which they advertise, these currently include Arts Council News, a-n news, Art Rabbit, Aldeburgh Gazette, Waveney & Blythe Arts website and Visit England website. 

In addition, we have taken a half-page advert in Village Voices, the local magazine that covers all the villages in the Woodbridge area and is distributed to all the households. It cost £50 for the advert but we figured it was worth it for the reach into those homes who know Shingle Street.

This required a re-design of the poster to fit with their size and aspect ratio:

Other admin activities involved finding out about insurance for the exhibition. The gallery covers the public liability insurance but insurance for the artworks has to be covered by the exhibitors. 

I found that a-n members have access to single exhibition insurance that covers things such as damage and theft but also covers transport to and from the exhibition including having to leave the artworks in a vehicle overnight. This insurance is only available for a-n members so it seemed like a good time to join (as a student). 

Hanging arrangements

Having decided to move the two images, the painting and the photograph, that make up the poster into the entrance area the arrangement of the paintings needed a slight change. The wall facing the entrance doors now looks like:

With space for blurb under the two works.

This meant that my triptych can now go in the main gallery room:

And the new painting can go to the far end wall where it fits better with Linda’s photographs:

Update:

When carefully reading through the terms and conditions of the gallery I noticed that the sales counter was referred to as ‘shared’. I contacted the gallery and they confirmed that any upstairs exhibition would also be able to use the counter in the entrance area. They also explained that the wall next to the counter would be available for them to use as hanging space. This means that we may have to re-think our arrangements for that area. They did however explain that at the moment the large upstairs gallery has not been booked for the week that we are there, so the problem might not arise. 

This is both good news and bad news, good news in that we might have the entrance area to ourselves, but it also means that footfall might be reduced if people aren’t passing through to visit the upstairs gallery. They did say that if the gallery gets booked between now and when our exhibition starts they would let us know, but we will have to work out a ‘plan B’ just in case.

This also may change things when it comes to producing a catalogue for the exhibition as we had intended to include a plan of the artworks rather than having labels next to them. 

If we did need to move our works from the wall in the entrance I will have to move my painting into the gallery room.

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SYP Part 4

New works and re-works again

As the exhibition date approaches more time has had to be spent in making arrangements and sorting out posters, framing, publicity and all the other things that need to be done. This has left less time for actual painting, and also less need to create more works as I already have more paintings than I actually need.

In the past few weeks however I have done one more new painting as it was something that I wanted to include in the exhibition, and I have been re-working another large painting that I had abandoned some time ago. The fact that this work was ‘disposable’ meant that I had no qualms about experimenting with it and this enabled me to work with greater freedom.

The work as I had left it back in August ’22 :

It is painted in oils and on a 100 x 100 cm canvas so I was keen to re-use the canvas if possible. I quite like the combination of the raw and burnt sienna with the grey but the structure of the image felt almost depressing with the way that the bands of colour sank down to the bottom right.

The large area of white at the lower edge didn’t feel right and in November of last year I had done some quick work on it but I was still unhappy with it and had put it away again.

Reducing the amount of white had helped but it still felt very dour. I thought that I would give it one last chance and having looked at it for a while I decided to turn the whole painting upside down.

I also painted over some of the more annoying sections of the painting and increased the textural feel of the image. 

It is still not something that I would be happy with, but it is interesting how inverting the canvas meant that the structure now feels somehow more positive with the bands of colour rising at the right-hand side of the painting. For the moment it therefore has had yet another reprieve although at some point I may decide that this dead horse has been flogged enough.


New work

Linda and I had been working on the design of the poster and had combined one of my paintings with one of her photographs as the main image. This got us to thinking that these two images should be in the entrance way to the exhibition together with a bit of written blurb. This layout seemed to work well and it also meant that the large work that I had originally planned to put in the entrance could now be moved into the main gallery room where it fitted nicely with the other works. It did however mean that the far end wall of the gallery needed another painting. As this wall, which has a window overlooking the sea, forms the transition between Linda’s photographs and my paintings I felt that a more realistic work would lead from the landscape works into the more abstract work of my stone and shell paintings. I also wanted to reference the coastal nature of the exhibition as none of my planned paintings relate to the sea. I did however want to still keep the close focus on place as a concept rather than wide open vistas and so I decided to do a painting of the edge of the sea as it spills over the stones of the shingle beach.

The section of the wall beside the window is 1.3m wide and so a 60 x 60 cm painting would fit without getting cramped. Working in acrylics I used the same technique that I had used with the small ‘flower’ paintings to represent the shingle but on a larger scale. 

My source image was cropped from a much larger photograph:

Although I was using this as a source I wanted to have more colour variation as the photograph tends to flatten everything down. Also I wanted to make a comment about the rising sea levels due to climate change and so I have tried to portray the waters slowly creeping up the beach.

I started with a grisaille over a black background:

Then added colour, shading and highlights:

The Waters are Rising acrylic on canvas (60 x 60 cm)
Detail
Detail
Detail (with signature Hag Stone)
Detail