Art Weather

by Cooper on 6/18/2010 10:24:27 AM1 Comment

Greetings,

Welcome to the Cooper studio, Jefferson, Iowa. The rain is gently falling in Jefferson right now.

BUT. Let's talk about Art Weather. My husband called from his office in Ralston, Iowa, just west of Jefferson. "Karen, if you love your garden, you're going to go cover it quick. Ralston is getting pounded with hail and it's headed your way" Lovely. I whip out of my jammies and into my play (ha) clothes. Running through the garage I upend both recycling bins. Too bad about the recycling all over the garage floor, but the bins are the perfect size to cover two tomato plants. At this moment, I have lawn chairs parked over the basil and an eggplant. A step stool is parked over the next spinach salad. Five gallon buckets are upside down over two Hungarian hot wax pepper plants. We only have one sweet pepper plant---it's hiding under an old metal pot. And how on earth does this relate to art???

This morning harkens me back to an earlier time.... Oh, wait, it was actually just six days ago. Hinsdale Art Festival, Hinsdale, Illinois. Yours truely was exhibitor #140, a lovely setting in a lovely park. I arrived early, got set up, and it all looked beautiful.

About this same time of the morning, here come the people in charge with the bad weather report. (Karen, if you love your garden, er, I mean, art---) So, up goes the adrenaline level, down go the zippers on the Ezup walls. The brunt of the storm slides to the northwest and the show continues, until about 4pm when a policeman walks by with the same information, second verse. Close enough to the end of the show day, this time the paintings go into the car, along with the propanels, etc. It would be hard to have a good second day of the show without them, right? Have I mentioned that putting an entire exhibit onto a cart and pushing it to the car parked over in the parking lot, (multiple trips) and loading it into the car is not an easy task? For the Sunday portion of the art show, I had to repeat all of that, minus the storm warnings. Yay for that little detail. If you are thinking about trying on the art fair exhibitor hat, consider yourself warned, it's not as easy as it looks. And bad weather makes it even harder.

So it wasn't great Art Weather last weekend, but we survived, as did the art. Oh, and garden update---the hail all got dropped west of here, my garden is happily soggy only. Now, I need to go pick up the recycling off the garage floor, resort it and get it back in the bins, collect all the other buckets and tubs and get them put away. What we won't do for what we love, right?

It makes me think about the class I just started, "Painting the figure" at the DesMoines art center. The DesMoines art center is a good hour15min drive from Jefferson, probably too far to drive for an art class, and makes getting home after a pretty late event. But what is art, if you are not always being the student, right?---working at it, always moving it forward? And so I go. What we won't do for what we love, huh?

Later, Cooper

Art Weather

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