Useful Day

Yesterday I went with Mo and Frank the Dripper to inspect the exhibition space at Preston Hall and meet its Curator. She couldn't have been more helpful and now we know what kind of space Figure 8 will have to fill when we put on our newly-arranged show there in May.

Preston Hall is a fascinating place, full of collections of all sorts of stuff, but notable for it's painting, The Dice Players by Georges de La Tour, the last he completed. The grounds are considerable and there's a curiously large aviary, some forty feet tall, containing rabbits! Boy, but those rabbits must fly higher than any I've encountered previously. I guess the snow kept them grounded.

The exhibition space is not enormous, but will give us an opportunity to show work to another part of the region. And the restrictions made by the addition of a picture rail part of the way up the wall makes it necessary, I think, for us to paint new work no larger than about two feet.

At last -- another target to work towards. Now maybe I can get focused.

After our trip to Preston Hall, I went on to the Art Club and made more progress on the Free Trade Inn picture. I didn't have my camera, unfortunately, so no work in progress photograph, but I'll try to remedy that today or tomorrow.