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End of Summer

For the first time ever, I took two months off from the studio. I had my granddaughter here for three weeks and then other family and friends for two months. It was a wonderful olde time summertime. I swam, read books caught up on paper work and contemplated life. The last two years were a marathon with Russell’s diagnosis, a year with hospice until he died meanwhile putting two solo shows together two years in a row. It was truly time to change the pace and so I did. Last week I returned to the studio and greeted it like a long lost friend. I feared I would have a terrible time getting going again. But I was pleased to jump right in. Started a triptych 72 inches long and a single piece 8 feet long. My summer show in Stowe VT was off to a very slow start but ended with the two 8 foot pieces selling. One went to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington and the other to a private client in Bermuda. Just imagine that shipping cost! Sales were very slow for lots of artists this  past summer.
My overview of selling work the past two years, is that the larger pieces are selling. So that is what I am sticking with as I start my new work for two fall shows. The first show is in the Claremont Opera House, Claremont, NH and will be mostly a retrospective. I promised to do it last yearr but the space is all run by voluteers and sometimes diffiucult to know ‘who’s on first’. The second show is at Lawrence Academy in Groton, MA. Nice gallery space in the arts building. One enters the theater through the gallery with large bright white walls.

One other rather encouraging sale after the VT show came down was a triptych to the widow of JD Salinger. It started out as three seperate pieces but while visting her, we put the three together. They were all of the Vanishing Landscape series. Since she restored her enormous barn on the property, she could really relate to my subject matter and the abstraction of the work.

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Interestingly, she owned the sculpture made with square cut nails from an old barn. It all came together beautifully. Some of the mark making in the wax is done with the rust on silk and old wiring, both elements of old barns. The work fit so well it was astonishing that it was not commissioned for the space.