Flora and Fauna

The Show opens Friday and I feel mostly ready. This will be the 6th or 7th (?) annual Show I've had at Half Moon Creek Gallery. Hard to believe how time has flown by. We time the Show date to coincide with the opening of Alaska's gardening season. My focus is usually metal garden art and there has been in past years such an incredible turnout I feel like I don't want to let anyone down, including the Gallery and my loyal customers. It's probably why I've been working with almost blinded intensity to have enough pieces in a variety of sizes and price ranges. Christian, one of the partners in the Gallery asked me a couple of weeks ago, if I had advertising and PR images I wanted to use for the Show. I told her I did and the images were of the latest seascapes using ceramic and steel. She gently asked me if those would be the best images to use since the Show is titled "IMBY -Inspirations From My Back Yard" and BTW, I do not live on the ocean. I chose the title because at the time I was creating some cool flora and fauna garden sculptures that were inspired by my garden surroundings. I quickly forgot about the Show's theme and forged ahead with a bunch of other not so flora-fauna IMBY themed art! Oh well. I returned to my original IMBY inspirations and made some more cool flora pieces.

It's a real juggle to be intensely making art, focusing on the creative process and take the time to also think about the other components of a Show. The marketing, advertising, direct mail, content of the Show, material costs, pricing, customer favorites, tagging, production flow and schedules, delivery schedules, set-up, etc. etc. etc. My brain feels split in half with the right side filled with great ideas that need to get out and the other (left side?) crammed with the account

ing and business to-do's. I've long felt my math brain is shrunken and I actually have two brains, a big fat creative brain and a little pea sized math brain squeezed into my one lovely mommy head. I'm extremely grateful for all that the Gallery does for me as a resident artist. I've said it before and I'll Blog it again, I gladly pay the Gallery their commission for all that they do for me. The business end of things is mostly taken care of by them and it's up to me to delivery the goods, so to speak -and that's not entirely true because next week they even offered to bring their open bed truck over and pick up some of the larger works!

We did sneak away this afternoon after the kiln was loaded with a bisque load. We bought our fishing licenses (yahoo!) and then went to Saturday Market. There are three or four full rows of vendors offering everything from junk to funk, food and art, and we saw our friend Elise there too with her cute puppy Dewy. Our mission is to hit the food row first and end up on the farmer's row for fresh veggies. Mmmmm...I go for the Earthquake Lemonade and Gyro's 

(sometimes 2!), the guys get their fill of either Brats, Piroshki's, Grilled Whole Ear Corn or dipped ice cream bars -then they steal sips of my lemonade, which is why I always buy two of those too  :)