Art from the HEart: recap

This was the 10th anniversary of Art from the Heart. It was one of things I was looking forward to, after weeks of focusing intently on houses, both mine and other people's.

(Which is a rather cryptic way of saying that we bought one house and sold another in the last month...)

The last two show + sales featured lots of artists and lots of people looking at the art, and this year's Art from the Heart show was no different.

One hundred and forty-seven artists had three pieces each on display and hundreds more came out to see, which meant that the MERC community center was packed.

My usual modus operandi is to do a quick tour and find out where my art has been hung, so I can sit somewhere and watch people look at the work.



I found my work quickly and noted with some dismay that one of my pieces was hung sideways. But, since we'd dropped off our pieces without hangers attached (we went straight from the framer's to the art drop-off location), I couldn't in good conscience complain about that.

So I didn't complain.

I also try to make two-three circuits of the room, one to make first impressions of the other work on offer, to see what draws me and what doesn't, and then another and another so I can properly shed those first impressions.

At some point during these go-rounds, I read through the programme, which includes pictures and bios of the artists.

There were several returning artists this year, whose work I hailed while dodging the throngs of people. There were also several many new artists whose work said any number of things...



Finally, I usually like watching the people buying art, how quickly they walk, how quickly they decide...except this year, it was different.

Instead of a headlong rush on the art in the first half hour of the sale, there was apparently a steady stream of sales in the last few hours.

I was tickled, while walking from the community center playground with M and Aa towards the end of the sale, to see a girl unlock her bike with one of my pieces under her arm.

One thing the organizers did this year was to offer artists a ten minute consultations with visual art professionals - in this case, arts writer/educator Amy Karlinsky and artist Racheal Tycoles.




I met with Tycoles, whose work "depicts the post-industrial landscape as a reflection of the romanticism of the past, the dystopia of the present and the search for the sublime." She also works in photography, which I thought was almost too too apt.

So I turned my upside-down piece right-side-up so she could see it, and listened.

And then I accepted the money for my piece & trucked my other two pieces home in the late November fall sun.

I didn't wear a frock either Friday or Saturday. And I was a little overwhelmed, first by the crush of people at the opening reception Friday, and second by the rush of buying/selling houses.

(Don't even ASK how the manuscript-editing is going. But give me a few weeks and I should be chugging along...)

Art from the HEart, yr. 3

Art From the Heart
10th Birthday Party
Art Show and Sale

Opening Night: Friday November 20th, 7 - 9 pm
430 Langside St.

Party attire please. Entrance is free, donations welcome

Saturday November 21st, 10 am - 4 pm

* * *

Join the festivities on Friday night with a giant birthday cake pumping out some sweet tunes at centre stage with DJ Mama Cutsworth, and some sweet treats and great Birthday 'give-aways', this art Sale will top the charts!

Celebrate 10 years of beauty, creativity and lots of cash going into the hands of inner-city and low-income artists. Over $30,000.00 has gone directly into the hands of our local artists over the past ten years, lets make this year another record breaker!

If you're shy of crowds come Saturday and enjoy the artwork in a more humble atmosphere.

For more information see our website at www.artfromtheheart.ca

* * *

This'll be my third year of placing art in Art from the Heart and M's first. Though it seems like a year-and-a-half since we dropped off our artworks, there's still a week or two before the sale...

Today I have two thoughts/feelings regarding said event:

1) gladness at another opportunity to show my images &
2) dismay at the phrase 'party attire.'

There's nothing like two weeks of moving gak to de-frock a girl...

squash

I've been thinking, over the past week or so, about what to submit for this year's Art from the Heart show. (Because I always do things to deadline and not a day before...

...which isn't a choice, necessarily, but it is how I operate.)

The first year, I did three HUGE macro photos of mushrooms. They were the best that I could do, my camera, the forest.

But they didn't sell and I couldn't afford, the second year, to spend as much money on printing/framing.

So I changed my focus a bit and did what felt like a triptych. The images were scans that juxtaposed household objects with some natural counterpoint.

Pink ribbons and Manitoba Maple seeds.

A tiny ceramic crucible, face down, and half a stinkhorn egg.

And they sold, which doesn't mean anything except that I had proof that one person liked the images.

This year, I was a bit torn. I had a few scans I really liked, but nothing that felt balanced as a trio. I had a handful of good macro pics but I didn't want my images, as a group, to (only) shout: REALLY BIG MUSHROOMS.

Because not everyone grooves on mushrooms the way I do. (The silly fools...)

So I found three images, scans AND photos, that seemed to be on speaking terms. And I made M process them when he should have been renouncing anything work-like, because I'm like that.

And now I just have to get them mounted. Hopefully I'll have time to get them mounted in time for art drop-off day, but if not, I can always get M to do it again.

While I fret.

(Poor M!)

* * *

Oh! I almost forgot. This was one of the scans that didn't make it into the final three.

But I liked it enough to post it here, so...here's its provenance:

The squash is from the Roland Pumpkin Festival, which I attended every year with my dear friend Tessa when I was fancy-free. Now I go every year with M and Aa and always hope to spend some time rubbing shoulders with Tessa and her various initials.

The cufflinks are from M's infamous grandfather. That I never met. That I think I would have liked, most of the time, and thought was deranged the rest of the time. Which is only a feeling, based on meeting his sons and co-mingling genes with his grandson, but...

M's mum passed these to me, knowing my enjoyment of heavy frippery, with a lump in her throat.

And the ladybug carapace I found on my bedroom floor, the beetle having hidden somewhere on my person or on M as it tried to find somewhere warm for the winter.

art from the...spleen?

I approached my second annual Art from the Heart show with some trepidation.

First of all, I knew there was a good chance that I'd be taking my pieces home at the end of the exhibit. (Like last year...)

I'd prepared for this eventuality by printing the images smaller (16X20 instead of 20X30) and mounting them on acid-free cardboard instead of block-mounting them but also by girding my mental loins.

This meant that since the finished pieces cost me less, I could charge less for them ($60 versus $135).

The other source of trepidation was that I had a long, horrible Friday after a less-than-kind week.

And the two family members who'd said they'd attend the show with me and help me herd Aa in and among the throng - I'd estimate there were at least 200 people there - both sort-of-kind-of let me know they wouldn't be able to make it. At least not in the capacity I was hoping for...

My vision for the evening had included being able to look at all the pieces carefully, to absorb some of the energy of the gathering, and to look at people looking at my pieces.

Knowing I'd have a bedtime-inclined Aa on my hands, I almost didn't go, demoralized by my day & my week.

But then I adjusted my expectations. So what if I didn't get to swan around? So what if my images didn't sell?

The show was all about community, about people at the beginning of their careers and people who will never have careers.

It was a room dedicated to people making something out of nothing...and it was thronged.

Aa enjoyed herself, even if her version of enjoyment included spilling her little pots of apple slices and Cheerios all over the gym floor.

I enjoyed watching the middle class zoom around in the first half hour of the sale, snapping up canvasses and infesting the room with little red dots.

I enjoyed the mirror some of the other artists held up for me, as pride at their work, finished and on the wall, combined with alarm at the number of bodies in the room, the press of 200 shifting bodies and the quiet pleasure of all those people looking at their work played over their faces.

Finally, I enjoyed the glad shock of turning a corner and finding my work. On the wall. At a small, unjuried show. But still: a glad shock.

It helped that ALL my pieces had sold by the time I got to the sale at 7:15 (the show started at 7:00). It helped that Aa cooperated - or cooperated as much as a two-and-a-half-year-old can.

And it helped that people spent a fair amount of time with the work. The writer in me wanted to flip over the images and show them the snippets of text, the provenance I'd assigned to each, pasted to the back.

But since I've started trading in images, I stood back and let the pieces speak.

And it helped, finally, that I sort-of-kind-of got my wish. I got to go back on the second day of the sale and have a look see at the other art. And I even got to see who had bought the images - as I suspected, one person had bought all three.

This being Winnipeg, it was one of M's ex-girlfriends. But neither of us knew we sort-of-kind-of shared a man when I told her they were my pieces and when she told me how excited she was to have them.

Also, she had purple hair. It was nice purple hair.

Though there were six million other things happening this weekend and the next few weeks promise to be even busier, I greatly enjoyed Art from the Heart-ing.

I'm still not sure what I should do with all of my images, my digital heaps of mushrooms, but I was reminded again what makes people so tricky: they ruin everything but they also, inexplicably, make things just to make them.

And so, even though I was fully expecting to a bundle of ambiguous feelings to take away with me as well as three 16X20 images, I feel pretty, well, good.

(Don't tell anyone, okay?)

this week

Art from the Heart, the annual art show/sale that takes place at the community centre down the street, is nearly upon us.

In a span of years where talking up Hallowe'en costumes and sitting on Santa's knee has become the new tradition, I appreciate older traditions, like attending this sale.

Hopefully, in a couple of years, having art in the show will be an old tradition too, hardly worthy of mention.

For now, I'm still excited about the prospect of seeing people see my work.

I've also been thinking it might be fun to make up greeting cards with some of my mushroom pics. I still have to investigate who prints such in Winnipeg and environs, but it might be the easiest (and most practical) way to share the images.

And I'm all for functional art...says the girl who writes poetry but who also drinks her tea from pottery mugs.

What to look for in winter

An image by C.F. Tunnicliffe, from What to Look for in Winter (Wills & Hepworth Ltd, England, 1959), a part of the Ladybird Nature Book series.

Thinking back on the Nightowls & Newborns tour and that last post I owe and, specifically, all the magpies we saw, while driving from Saskatoon to Edmonton or Edmonton to Regina or Prince Albert home.

Thinking on my sadly neglected forest (or is that the sadly neglected me, not having walked enough in the forest this fall...) and switching to photographing things other than growing mushrooms.

(Mushrooms under ice. Mushrooms on trees with cowls of snow. Brown greenery poking out of the snow. Green-y blue lichen in white woods. The warm crease between my neck and the scarf wound round.)

This is an infinitely better view than that out my front door this morning, what with winter arriving all at once, galumph.

We dropped off the three images for Art from the Heart (Nov. 21 & 22) after much fiddling with lighter fluid and spray adhesive, exacto blades and white glue.

But they're in and I'm sort of proud of myself for subduing the logistical tangles involved and, as always, grateful to M for his assistance.

Now that that's done, I'm looking forward to sharing in the other artists' visions, if only for a couple of hours, as it's become something to look for in winter.

(Aa exclaimed at us about the snow as we drove to the nice hippy lady that looks after her on my writing days. The snow on the house! The snow on the trees!)

art from the heart, year two

It's that time of year again. The annual (unjuried) art show for low-income inner-city artists, Art from the Heart, will be November 21 & 22.

As a resident of the Spence Neighbourhood, I've attended the show/sale for years but only submitted my photos last year.

None of them sold, which was humbling, but it gave me the opportunity to make enormous (20x30) prints of some of my mushroom pics and to live with same over the past year.

This year, the application was tucked in my mailbox and, all month, I intended to fill it out. But then I went on tour, which drained me of all logistics-savvy (so many emails just to arrange to be in a room with people and read them poems!), and immediately afterwards, I had several big (lit) deadlines.

So I missed the application deadline.

Luckily, the Art from the Heart administratrix was sympathetic to my excuses and let me get in a late application. Which meant that when I heard back from her, I had three days before I had to submit the actual art.

Which would work for a painter, say, because they'd just trot down three finished canvasses, assuming they had three finished canvasses to trot down. But given that I'm working in the photographic medium, I didn't have exhibition-sized images on hand.

And, of course, the photofinisher mis-printed the photos (technically, the scans, as I decided to submit three of my recent collages: pinked, horn, and, violet), so we had to have them re-printed.

Today we picked up the images (16X20 this year) and marched straight to the Artists Emporium to figure out a way to mount them that didn't include foam core, which I dislike, because the edges get all smushed, even with a minimum of handling.

The in-house framer suggested a combination of foam core and an arty cardboard whose name I can't recall, so M will be wielding the ruler & exacto tonight.

Lots of logistics and knife-wielding, but, somehow, having pieces in the show redeems this madcap year.

(Thanks, as always, to M, for all his help on such projects...)

heARTened

Hey all,

I've got thoughts and photos to share from the Art from the Heart event this past weekend but have had a dearth of time, a childcare emergency, and Creative Retirement curriculum to draft since the sale ended Saturday afternoon...

I should be able to write something tonight...but no promises.

I hope you're all well.

art from the heart

Press Release - November 12, 2007

“We’re going to be bursting at the seams with art” says Karen Schlichting, Art from the Heart Coordinator.

The 8th Annual Art from the Heart sale will be the largest sale to date with over one hundred and thirty inner city and low income artists participating this year.

The event runs from 7pm to 9pm Friday November 16 and Saturday November 17th from 10am to 4pm at the Magnus Eliason Recreation Centre (at 430 Langside St.).

“This year we have almost a 45% increase in our numbers of artists.”

The reasons could vary from word of mouth recruiting or simply because more inner city and low income artists are looking for affordable venues to sell and show their work.

“Most of the artists in the inner city don’t have any venue to sell their work so this is their annual chance to sell up to three pieces of their original work” says Schlichting.

The sale features works from small inner-city artist circles to University of Manitoba Fine Art students. The mediums include acrylic, oil, photography, encaustic, textile work, watercolour, video, sculpture and mixed media.

Art from the Heart resources these artists with the annual sale and also with workshops throughout the year for professional development of their art practice.

“I participate in the sale because I want my work to be seen,” says Cecil Humpries, a participant in the sale for the past two years and a resident of the Spence neighbourhood. “I try to do a little something everyday, because not doing artwork to me is like a day without sunshine.”

Another artist who works in watercolour, Charles Savill, says “It is a way to keep cultured and it’s a good way to showcase your recent work. The artwork is made more dignified by being displayed gallery-style.”

Admission to the sale is free. Friday night features live music with the Swirldines (a three piece rocksie, bluesie, folksie band) and video short screening. Bring cash or cheque book only. Any money spent on art goes directly to the artist.

* * *

Hey all, I submitted 20X30 float-mounted prints of three of my recent mushroom pics for this show - crown, fingerling, and clump.

We got the prints back from the framer's a few days before they were to be turned in to Art from the Heart organizers but I almost couldn't look at them. They were huge and disorienting and wonderful...

It goes without saying that I've been looking forward to the show for weeks...but it shouldn't go without saying thank you to M, who used his professional photographer/photo editor skills to ready the files for printing.

Yay!