On Saturday, April 25th, I drove to Spring Grove, Minnesota. The Bluff Country Artists Gallery is there. As you know from an earlier entry (February 20, 2009), I am new to the gallery. It was the spring art tour weekend in southeast Minnesota, and the gallery was part of the tour. They had invited me to be there on Saturday to meet people who would be visiting the gallery. I was uncertain as to what the outcome might be (Spring Grove is quite a small community), but it ended up being great. What a wonderful turnout of interested people, a number of whom had come down from the twin cities. I guess the point of all of this is that sometimes things happen in the least likely places. I work hard to become established in larger metropolitan areas such as Washington DC and Chicago, but the true excitement can be right in one's own back yard.
On the way to the gallery in the morning, I stopped in Lansing, Iowa which is a small town, relatively untouched by tourism and located on the Mississippi River. I had coffee with an artist friend from Cedar Rapids who has a place there. Fred Easker and I had communicated previously by email and this get together was a chance to become better acquainted. After the art tour and the time in Spring Grove, I drove the several miles to Decorah, Iowa where I delivered an etching to Agora Arts, which is a gallery that has represented me for a number of years. If you have read my February 20th blog entry, you will know about my previous trip to Decorah. The Phelps Park drawing that I had drawn onto the plate in the cold of February was compositionally not sitting well with me. I had come to accept the fact that it was necessary to redraw the composition onto the copper plate. As I pulled into the park, I could hear thunder in the distance. Being near the end of the day, it was also getting dark out. I knew that I had to make the most of my time there. I was able to get the new drawing onto the plate, once again drawing directly onto the copper using a sharpie. In a half hour, large drops of rain began to fall. The water prevented my marker from working on the metal. The time spent since February deliberating over the composition was well worth it, however. The results this time were better. I darted through the pouring rain back to my van. I drove the 2.5 hours back to Wisconsin, tired but invigorated by the day of meeting people and hard work. I do my best to make sure that my artist's life is never dull.
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