It could well be my last opportunity for at least a week. I have been looking forward both with eager anticipation and dread to the coming week. For the first time since I started painting seriously I find myself facing the prospect of opening two fairly substantial solo exhibitions in the same week. I will spend all day on Tuesday in Bradford Cathedral, setting up the display of my material dealing with Italian experience during the Great War.* Then on Thursday I go through a similar experience with an exhibition of my landscape material at the Bingley Arts Centre.**
I have been attempting to reduce the strain of events by anticipating as much as possible of the tasks that need doing, such as preparing labels for the pictures and identifying the supporting material I will need. There are always things that crop up at the last minute, however, and I don’t anticipate that either task will pass off without any hitches. One thing will be novel for me and that’s for sure. I will be supported in the Cathedral by a skilled workman with extensive experience of the task in hand. That ought to make life a great deal easier. Also on neither occasion will I be required to bring and erect my own display stands and lighting, which has been a tremendous burden on some occasions in the past.
In the middle of all of this I am going to have to fit in two medical appointments, two meetings and a trip over the border into Lancashire to collect a clock that is being repaired by a specialist craftsman. To add to the sense of pressure, other members of the family have decided that it is an opportune moment to start planning for our mutual visits over the Christmas period. I hope that I will have the opportunity to keep in touch, but I’m bound to be a bit frazzled. Wish me luck!
*The is the exhibition entitled “Presente!” The past in the present: Italy and the Great War.
**The title I’ve given to this one is A Closer Look, and it will show a variety of those things I classify as falling somewhere between landscape and still life.