This Past Weekend & Some Really Big News

This past weekend was the first in a month that I didn’t spend laying on my back in pain from the bulging disk. Hence it was a very busy weekend, as I had a lot of photographic “darkroom” work to do in preparation for my first gallery show. Yes, you read correctly. Gallery Show!

Thanks to the efforts of Rob on behalf of the Central Maryland Photographers’ Guild, the current members of the CMPG – the organization founded by Geren and I – will be exhibiting a selection of, and hopefully selling our finest photographs at the Margaret Smith Gallery on Main Street in old town Ellicott City, MD starting on Thursday October 21, 2004, for a period of 2-3 weeks. I will provide information about a reception and other details as it becomes available. I haven’t said anything about this until now because I wanted to be sure that it was actually going to happen before I started telling people about it. Anyway, as I was saying I had a lot of catch up work to do. My short biography and CD with a thumbnail catalogue of the images I plan to display is due this Wednesday evening. Between wanting and needing to spend quality time with Jenne, being laid up on my back on the weekends, various doctor’s appointments, four or more hours of PT a week, staying over in Northern Virginia twice a week, and the time on the commute, plus trying to pitch in around the house, I have not had much time to work on the twenty or so images I want to include until this past weekend. Doing all of this work also made clear to me how much I do need a current computer. My six year old Pentium II 486 PCs just aren’t cutting it anymore and are dying the slow death. All of that aside I am very excited and a bit stressed about my first gallery show and the first gallery show for our group. For a group such as ours to move from relative obscurity to exhibiting in a fine-art gallery in less than a year is quite an achievement and virtually unheard of. Even with the thumbnail catalogue complete I still have loads of work to do. There is printing, matting, framing, and having professional 4x 6 business cards with a few images on them made. I was thinking of several different cards each with three or four different images on them kind of like collector’s cards, but that may be a bit over ambitious right now. About the framing the good news is that I only need to actually frame about eight to ten prints. The hard part about that is picking which eight to ten out of the twenty! YIKES! It was hard enough narrowing it down to twenty from the list of thirty I had originally brainstormed about. Plus I am waiting for some feedback from a very select group of photographers/artists for their input about my likely show photos. The unframed photographs can simply be matted and shrink wrapped for inclusion in a bin that gallery patrons can flip through. The images that don’t sell will be hanging on the walls of our newly decorated house along with our other artwork, until future gallery shows and sales. I am hopeful that the Margaret Smith Gallery will like my work enough to ask me to leave the photographs on their walls and to bring them new works. It would be awesome to be a regularly featured local fine arts photographer in my home town. I am also hopeful that this will lead to bigger and better things for me with my photography. Maybe a more suitable and better career for me.

Thanks Jenne for your love, support and understanding during all of this!