How to hold an exhibition

Well this weekend has been a busy one! I had 4 works in the Golden Plains Art Awards:

Devils Marbles at Sunset - Pastel

After The Storm - acrylic on canvas

Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse - acrylic on canvas

Dead Tree in Front of the Dunes - acrylic on canvas

I also had 4 unframed works for sale in this exhibition. Hopefully I sold some! I delivered these works to the venue on Thursday, and then yesterday I delivered 17 works for the exhibition that I, together with 11 of my classmates, are holding as the final ever graduating students from our school. (It is closing at the end of this semester, which is very sad, but luckily most of us will have completed our degrees!). We spent the entire day yesterday hanging work and making the gallery look AMAZING!

Unframed prints - so so many!

 We had so much work between us! There are 12 of us exhibiting and we have quite literally filled the entire gallery. The gallery consists of two front rooms, a hallway which you can see in the photo below, then another room to the left after the office (which is just at the end of the hallway in the next photo). To the right of the end of the hall, is another room which is now filled with prints and drawings, and then off that yet another space filled with drawings and prints, and a couple of artist books as well.

Working out the spacing

Artist and self portrait!

 We worked hard, but for the most part the day was lots of fun! It was certainly tiring and a great look into what it takes to to stage an exhibition. We all brought our work in, and the large paintings were all placed in the two front rooms and the hall. All the drawings and prints were put into the back area. We then had to work out which paintings should go where. This was done methodically, room by room, and we had pretty good general consensus on most of the work, but luckily we had our trainers, Heather and Andrea, there to help us along and guide us (I'm sure there may have been just a few disagreements if not!).

Hard at work!

 After we decided on the larger paintings, we made the decision that the smaller uniformed size square ones should all go in the hall to be grouped together, then we had to begin measuring! This involves working out eye height. So we took Rachelle, who is probably height wise, the average of us all, and decided that her eye height would be our midline. All the paintings and pictures would be centered on this height, of 160cms. Then we had to measure all the paintings and find the middle of them, and then add the distance between the middle of the picture and the height that the hanging wire sits at. This measurement was added onto our eye height. For example, if the hanging wire on a painting was 23cms above the middle of it, we added 23 to 160. This gave us a measurement of 183cms, and that measurement is where the hook for the painting was placed on the wall! Sounds complicated, but it's not really, it's just tedious. The end result though, is very harmonious - all the paintings have their middle sitting at eye height and it makes it pleasing for people as they wander the gallery! You can probably tell though from that, that it made for a loooooong day!

Two of my copperplate etchings.

We have prints, unframed and framed, along with things like artist books!

 Once the paintings were all up, we had to measure the distance between them to make sure it was even, put numbers on the wall next to them all for the catalog, (so people know whose work is whose!), the we had to use a level (or our eyes when we got fed up with the level!) to make sure that they were all sitting straight on the wall! After that we had lunch then moved on to the prints and drawings! Same deal again, except there are waaaaaaay more of them than the paintings! AND they were all hung in multiples on the hanging strips. So a lot of measuring again! Then we had to finish up with the number system, and Rachelle worked very hard on the catalog making sure it corresponded with the numbers on the wall - this was a little difficult with a few because not everyone was there, but we got it figured out in the end!

Oil on canvas - Altered Landscape - one of mine

Mixed media on canvas, another of mine, titled Mixed Emotions

Nude - I still love the round canvas I painted this on.

My transcription titled Musician - oil on canvas

The end result (or at least a small section of it!)

I am hard at work hanging prints and making sure they are spaced and centered evenly

A personal favourite - my mixed media on canvas titled Imagination.

This was all my work stacked up at home the night before, ready to transport to the gallery

In the end, we cleaned up, and had a look around. And the difference seeing your paintings and prints on a wall with a little number plate next to it in a gallery setting, to seeing them at home laying everywhere, is HUGE!! They all look so professional! And it makes you kind of realise that a lot of the work you see in galleries, looks like that because of the work that the artists and curators have done. That you shouldn't judge your own work compared to what you see in a gallery until you have seen yours in the same kind of setting, and seen how it changes the look of a work. It makes you feel good. Yes, the work has to be of a good enough standard to begin with, but placing it in a gallery setting makes it just so much more professional looking. A great lesson and a great confidence builder as well.

I'll do a follow up post with more pics of the exhibition and opening next week!