9/25 More Art Thoughts

so, dang!  I am trying to get this blog posted every day, and I am really having a hard time with it! I can't believe I haven't posted since last Wed!  Because I had such a great time on Thursday when I went down to hand out awards at the Watercolor Society Show at the Ames Center!  The celebration was from 6 to 8 with presentations at 7, and I drove mom's Cabrio Convertible down because I've been driving that a lot lately. Our van is deteriorating rapidly and I wanted Duane to have the safer CRV for driving the boy around, so I was using mom's 2000 Cabrio, which is certainly fun but also a bit quirky...

Annie 8x8 

sold

Anyway, there were a lot of people there for the presentation, and I had sat down earlier in the day, looking through the photos I'd taken on my phone at the ones I'd chosen for the awards because I wanted to make sure I had something to say about each one. I felt I wanted to take this job seriously and make it clear that I was a professional as well as an artist.  I can be goofy and fun, but I also want to be respected. There's a difference between being seen as Phoebe on "Friends" and being seen at Kat Corrigan, artist and educator.
At 7, Theresa, the organizer and hanger of the show, got on the microphone to quiet every one down and get started, and that took a minute or two, then I got on and thanked everyone for coming and talked about how I paint on black, and so to see a show like this with so much light in it is quite wonderful. I wanted to make sure everyone who had a piece new that this was a great thing to do, and I had a list of several quotes from Robert Genn that I read off- this was one of them, because it was a crowd of people my age or older mostly...
"As we grow older, we realize just how limiting were our earlier conceptions. Art is something else. Art is fluid, transmutable, open-ended, never complete, and never perfect. Art is an event."
And I closed my general remarks with this one...
"Keep busy while you are waiting for something to happen."
I wanted everyone there to also understand how brave it is to out your work out into the world, to let other people see that part of you of which you are so proud.  And I also said that I would be sticking around after the awards if anyone wanted to talk to me about their own piece, oh and I also said I'd had a really hard time settling on the final 10 pieces, and that there were 20 pink post-it notes around the room under the first go around...
And it was really fun!
I had many people come up to me afterwards to tell me I had done a really great job, and that they learned something from my explanation of what I'd seen in each artist's work.  I felt really great about that. I knew I couldn't make everyone happy, but I wanted to keep the "my work is terrible" mindset out of there.
So I had a great time, and drove the little Cabrio home cautiously.  The ABS light was on the whole way, and I drove as slowly as I dared up Cedar Ave.  We have since found that there's a great pile of rust under the hood, and that the poor little car will probably not survive any kind of a hit or jolt. Poop.  I love driving that little sparkle car!  I'll get a photo of it and put it in here tomorrow.
So here's a cat commission for you to look at!
This is the time to get your pets in if you're hoping for a Christmas present of a pet portrait!

Wahoo!