The family all arrive a half hour before anyone else. It gave us time to get the Cheese platters out on the tables and get the Catalogues in place. My eldest daughter handed out Catalogues at the door. Some guestes arrived early which was nice as we hadn’tseen each other for a while and it gave us some time to catch up and have a chat before everything started to get busy. Get busy it did…I stood at the entrance for most of the evening, meeting and greeting people coming in and thanking people going out! It was reminiscent of a wedding!
We tallied approx 150 people throughout the night!
The very wonderful Anthony Breslin had agreed to open the speeches for me. He is so generous, especially as his own art practice has him etremely busy! He arrived along with the majority of people who were coming and we set about getting the show open! His speech was very kind. He spoke of the bravery of an artist putting their work on display and his interpretation on some of my work. I was so pleased to have him do this for me. I admire him as an artist and a friend. His own arts practice is hugely prolific and he works at maintaining regular business hours to be able to meet the demand for his work! He was very gracious and it was a lot easier for me to take the microphone from him, to say my speech, than it would have been on my own. Thank you Anthony!
I decided to let the paintings do the talking to the quests as their messages may be different from those I received while making them. Titles are a great tool for sharing meaning with an audience but in this instance, I felt strongly the only reference would be to the series the painting belonged in and the Message no. I think it worked well as many people came up with varied readings that enabled them to feel something personal to them from the work.