I spent a good part of today invigilating my exhibition, Almscliff Crag: an enduring obsession, at the South Square Centre in Thornton. As expected, the flow of visitors was fairly slow, but the time spent in the gallery was far from wasted.
After the opening night, and benefiting from the comment of a couple of colleagues, I recognised that the labelling of my work could be improved. So I took advantage of the time available in order to replace it with a rather more viewer-friendly version. Then I realised that the rather hurried adjustment of the lighting I had made at the end of the installation session could also be improved on. It was a rather challenging task to find an optimum solution because the gallery is in a very old building, and the large oak beams in the ceiling seem to obstruct the illumination however you approach the problem. The situation ended up distinctly better, however, by the time I had spent half an hour teetering on a chair and attempting to make fine adjustments to the direction of the fittings. I reckon I’m as pleased with the situation as I could be in the circumstances.
Then, of course, there was the perennial entertainment to be found in any gallery, of watching the behaviour of the pundits. The game of speculating about what might be going on in their heads as they look at the pictures is always intriguing. I have yet to decode the language of grunts in which they communicate as they walk around.
As usual, however, I found that there is always value in simply spending time, looking at the work, and trying to see it afresh. Although you might think that artists would know exactly what their work looks like after spending so much time with it in the studio, this is not the case. Not only are the circumstances in which it is encountered in the gallery different from those in the studio, the experience of confronting it again as if new is always instructive. I’m pleased to say that I have found the experience to be quite encouraging. I will need to continue with the life-drawing classes when I have the opportunity. I was aware that the few cases ins which human figures featured in this particular show did underline the fact that my figure-drawing is not of the best. So it was a matter of four hours well-spent.