Autumn Leaves

It’s September when the leaves start turning and the weather gets crisp, there’s football on TV and the coats have come out of the closet. And with this change of seasons, painters head back into their studios to paint away the dead days of winter and photographers head out to brave the cold winds and capture the fall colors. Wow, that’s a lot of work for the first day of the month.

And all of it is true and necessary, of course if you’ve been reading the Trawler and have made pals with someone from another discipline then there’s no worries, while you work at your craft they will be out creating new art and storing away the sights and sounds so that you can borrow a picture now and then to make your latest paintings glow.

But should all of the artists burrow in for the winter? No, no, and absolutely no, there are even more shows coming up and this is the time to look back through all of your creations and see if any of them fit. You can’t just curl up in a ball and wait for spring.

There’s the CAM Biennial, yes I do know it isn’t a juried show and anyone can hang anything and why would a serious artists want to expose their hard won work to a bunch of amateurs? Because when you can hang anything that’s very likely to be what gets hung. If those in the serious art community don’t play then they certainly can’t complain about what gets put up.

And what about the rewards? Rewards for a non-juried show? Yeppers, the People’s Choice winner will get a solo exhibition. Now if that doesn’t stir your competitive juices what will? I know you have a closet full of stuff that was absolutely brilliant, but some blockheaded jury couldn’t see past their own up-turned noses and so it went from the submission CD straight to the closet. This is the time to get it out, dust it off and get it ready for the deadline.

The deadline is only three weeks away and you know how things get messed up once you put them away, frames rub, canvas and prints wrinkle, and even in a locked, darkened closet, finger prints appear on any glass surface not guarded day and night. Get out the polish and the wipes and make sure that when the time comes you are ready.

Three weeks people, that’s just enough time to fill out the paper work. Yeah, any official body gets its funding by generating paper work. “In addition to seven feature exhibitions and nine artistic development programs, our youth outreach and the gala fund raisers, we generated six million cubic tons of paper work.”

So get cracking and go to CAM’s website and download the paper work so that you can fill it out at home where you actually have a pen that works and a flat surface you can write on and light and your glasses and then when September 20-22 comes along you won’t panic or get left out and you too could be feature in a solo exhibit.

Hurry, next up, we’re talkin’ about fishin’…