At the start of this week I was overjoyed by the assistance I received from Bradford Cathedral, in setting up the exhibition there of my exhibition of material relating to Italian experience during the Great War. Today I hung my solo show at the Bingley Arts Centre, showing my landscape material. The contrast couldn’t be greater. I’m grateful to the Centre for the opportunity to exhibit my material, of course, but the task was really hard work. There was nobody available to help me. I was given a step-ladder and a box of hanging wires and left to get on with the job.
In the event I managed to hang a display of around thirty items within three hours. The work isn’t quite finished, as I forgot to take my glass cleaning materials with me, and somehow managed to omit two pieces from the list of labels. (I’ll go back tomorrow to tidy up.) Even so, I reckon it was a first-rate example of efficiency.
I wonder how many students entering art school have an appreciation of the range of skills they are going to need to acquire if they are going to operate as artists. How many of them will be taken by surprise at the requirement to have a head for heights, needed to suspend a picture from wires while standing on top of a ladder? More than that: I have been surprised by the extent to which being an artist requires me to have a sound grasp of basic arithmetic, needed to calculate the spacing of pictures along a wall. Life is full of surprises.