The Studio Tour

The first weekend of the Orange County Artists Guild Open Studio Tour has come and gone and this coming Saturday and Sunday will close out the Tour for this year.

Traffic was light last Saturday and for that I was actually thankful. It rained in the morning and remained bone chillingly cool and damp throughout the day. Since I show outdoors, (under open cover), lighter than usual traffic meant being able to stay inside from time to time where it was warm and dry. I spent the time printing note cards of my work that I offer for sale.

Sunday was a beautiful Fall day here in central North Carolina. Turnout was steady, interested, and interesting. There are always good questions and comments from visitors. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from the encounters.

The days in between the two weekends are like none other throughout the year for me – maybe something like the week between Christmas and New Year’s for folks who work in an office. I know some work places just shut down during Holiday Week, others work with a reduced staff. No matter, it’s rarely very productive. 

For me, it’s not a week when I start something new so there's a bit of idleness and waiting to the days. It is a week when I think about my work in ways I don’t always think about it. The financial comes into play here, as well as deeper and darker questions concerning value and worth of the work, of me, of my path in this life.

Inevitably, a sense of melancholy creeps into the equation. And I try to counter that with thoughts of future projects, new directions, new resolutions. 

Just this morning I got a chance to look, only for a second time, at the Spain and Portugal contact sheets. Narrowing down my choices for gum printing. Also trolling though some other work from the past year. 

The thought of being back in the darkroom is growing stronger as the busyness of recent months begins to pass.

Playing catch-up

The last month or more has passed in a fog that coincides with the annual Studio Tour. A late rush of printing starting in the summer and early fall are followed by a few weeks of show prep in October – matting,  then milling and constructing frames, then coloring them before assembling all the parts into a finished piece.

And then there’s the two weekends of opening the house and studio up to the public. Twelve hours of show time each weekend that span the entire length and breadth, the ups and the downs that go along with putting your work out there for others to see.

I don’t live in town like the bulk of the 70 artists that participate on the tour. There’s a furniture maker a mile or so down the road. And a water colorist lives a mile or so in the opposite direction. My closest neighbor Scott, a painter, has been on the tour for several years but he didn’t participate this year.

Drive a mile or two in any direction in town and you’re likely to pass 20 or 30 participating studios. Drive a mile or two in any direction out here and you’ll pass more cows and horses than artists. 

All of this is to say that I’ve never gotten the kind of traffic that town artists get. On good days, 50 or more people come out. A good day for a town artist means closer to 100 visitors.

This year, I didn’t have that many people stop by over the first weekend. That made for two long boring days. But the second weekend was nice and lively. A good, steady flow of traffic both days and thankfully, quite a few sales.

And then there’s the morning after all of that. That’s the Monday after the second tour weekend. That day starts a little slower than usual. Slow sips of coffee. A little extra reading. And then I walk around the house and yard with a notepad, writing down all the chores that have been neglected for several months. That list is always long. It can run to several pages -- this year's is 3. Checking things off that list is what I’ve been busying myself with the past couple of weeks. Cut, prep and install shelves in bedroom closet, Clean solar panels before winter sets in,  are two successfully completed tasks. Another is: Clean basement. Not as of yet. But from here I'll spread the remainder of the list out over time, with less rush to scratch than three weeks ago. 

Along the way, I went through and selected five photographs from Ireland, 5 from my Manbites Dog Series, and 5 of a more local or personal nature to occupy the coming winter. I've just begun the process of making enlarged negatives from each of those photographs. Scanning the original negatives is next up for most of these though I've already got the manbites scans on file from last year's book project. Here they are, ready for inversion to negative.

While scanning the others, I can begin to print these. The darkroom beckons!

Show time!

The 19^th Annual Orange County Open Studio Tour always falls on the first two weekends of November. This year, the dates are November 2-3 and 9-10. More than 70 local artists are participating. My studio is #25. Brochures are available in likely places around town or you can download one here.

Each year I get an interesting and diverse mix of visitors from collectors, to students of photography, to folks just out for a pleasant weekend activity. This year I plan to exhibit 30 to 40 prints. And with less than two weeks until show time, the making of lists and scratching them off has already begun!

Currently, I'm making an inventory of available prints. Some are hanging in various locations around town. Some are standing stacked in a corner at home. Others need to be matted or framed. I’ve also looked through my pile of finished prints from the past few months of work. Ranking them, I suppose. I'm down to the top 15 and still cutting!

The plan is to select no more than a dozen new prints to finish out. In addition, 8 or 10 prints were framed out for a couple of shows last summer that haven't shown locally. Combined, that should satisfy my need to show new work whenever exhibiting.

That's because not showing new work feels a little too much like being unemployed. Simply put, we are what we create in this life. Most employed people in our society get a paycheck every week or two that provides regular gratification (hopefully) and validation for their labor. Sadly, making gum bichromate photographs doesn't come with that built in work perk. More likely, it comes in the form of holding a satisfyingly-finished-but-still-dripping-wet print in my hands. From there. matting, and framing, and exhibiting these newborn prints completes the creation cycle.