Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends. As you many know, Canada celebrates Thanksgiving 1 month earlier. It makes no sense to me, unless it’s because fall comes sooner up here in the “North”.

There are so many things on my To-Do list that this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down to chat with you in over a week. As mentioned in my last post, I was in Dallas from November 19th to 22nd to plan my upcoming exhibition.

The trip was an amazing week of celebrity treatment. My head was spinning after 4 days of meeting art-world movers and shakers, fine art collectors and society ladies and enjoying the luxury of a chauffeur-driven Bentley and the finest restaurants Dallas has to offer.

I enjoyed myself immensely and am so grateful for the generous hospitality of Christine & Eric Brauss and Alan Barnes. Believe it or not though, I was actually relieved to be home and back in the solitude of my studio this week. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to fully experience both the very private and public aspects of my art career.

My solo exhibition opens Thursday, February 12th at the Alan Barnes Fine Art gallery. They will be featuring 36 of my small and medium-sized paintings on canvas. This past August, after our first introductory meeting, I shipped 6 paintings for them to see. This recent trip I brought 12 more small paintings with me on the plane. While I was there, Alan Barnes made his final selection of 18 larger paintings from photographs and a CD I brought down with me. Here’s the grouping which needs to be shipped as soon as I can arrange it with my customs broker.

Several of the paintings which Alan Barnes selected were in Toronto at the Leonardo Gallery.  They are having a Group Show in December called “White Slate” and were hoping to include some of these mid-size canvases. I drove down to Toronto on Tuesday and Wednesday to talk to the director and they were wonderful about letting me have them back for Dallas. They still have 5 of my larger canvases and will have those in the group show. Here’s their poster. I’m the little square on the bottom right.

Leonardo Gallery Poster

Alan Barnes Fine Art in Dallas, Texas has decided to move up my Solo Exhibition from March to February. The show is now opening February 12th instead of March 12th which is 1 whole month sooner. Only 12 weeks from now ! Yikes !!

So much to do to prepare. I’m flying down to Dallas on Wednesday to meet with Alan Barnes for 2 days. We need to go over art selection, framing options, pricing, press releases, mailing lists, advertising, public relations and opening reception. We will also plan the Postcard Invitation and the Exhibition Catalog by choosing the appropriate images.

I’ll be staying with Mrs Christine Brauss who is sponsoring a Preview Exhibition a few days before the gallery opening at her Country Club. A percentage of sales from the Preview Reception will be donated to The Kidney Foundation which is a charity near and dear to her heart. The three of us will be planning that reception as well while I’m there.

So before I leave on Wednesday, I need to print a Gallery Binder, which is basically a portfolio with photos of all artwork available, resume, artist statement, bio and previous media. Alan Barnes also wants a disc of photos of me and all images of  the art in various formats for publication and emailing.

I’m also bringing a box of small paintings with me on the plane. This means Customs Forms require filling out and the art needs to be photographed, documented and packed for safe transport.

There may not be much time to sleep over the next few days. It’s all so exciting.

For the past several weeks in the studio, I’ve been concentrating on finishing a series of 12″ x 12″ encaustic wax pieces. I finished 6 in total and here are a few of them.

Mostly this time I experimented with carving through several layers of various pigments to see what would be uncovered. Instead of adding color as I do with painting, with encaustic, I remove it. This process of thinking in reverse makes for interesting brain gymnastics.

Blue Colorscape Encaustic

Green-Blue-Red Encaustic Colorscape

On Friday, I decided to take the afternoon off and go get inspired by great art. A friend of mine met me at my studio at 2:30 pm and we drove all the way to another country……….

My Canadian studio to the Detroit Institute of Art = about 5 miles

Detroit - Windsor Border

One of the greatest advantages of living in a border city is being close to world class art, music and culture without all the congestion and expense of living in a big city. The Windsor / Detroit border crossing is the busiest in North America. There are 2 crossings in Windsor, the Ambassador Bridge and the Windsor / Detroit Tunnel which runs under the Detroit River. Timing is always tricky. It can take 10 minutes or 2 hours depending on time of day and level of US security alerts. Since 9/11 everything has tightened up considerably. Everyone leaves themselves lots of extra time to get across now.

Ambassador Bridge

On Friday, we crossed through the Tunnel in a jiffy and were at the Detroit Institute of Arts by 3:00 pm.

We primarily went to see the new exhibition “Monet to Dali” - “Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art. What a gorgeous mix of paintings by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cassatt, Seurat, Gaugin, Matisse, Pissarro, Dali, Picasso, Bazille and Tissot to name only a few.

Two of my favorites were by Van Gogh and Monet, neither of which I was familiar with. Both were fairly small landscapes. The confidence in each brushstroke combined with lush, luminous color were breathtaking. These paintings looked so fresh it was hard to believe they’d been painted 100 years ago.

It’s been pretty hectic around here and I feel spread a little thin. This is only a partial list of everything that’s been going on the past week.

♦ Got my new MacBook Aluminum and there’s always a time-consuming learning curve adjusting to new technology. Very cool though !

♦ SmArtist has offered to market my e-Book “Stand Out in a Crowd - Step by Step Guide to  Creating Impressive Images for Your Artist Portfolio.” We’ve been busy writing a Contact Agreement the past week.

♦ My deadline for making final changes to the E-Book is this Friday. It now needs to be polished with Screen Captures and photos. I’ve been busy doing that and writing Bonus Reports to offer Value Bundling.

♦ In the studio I finished a series of 6 Encaustics on Wood measuring 12″ x 12″, 1 Acrylic on Canvas measuring 12″ x 12″ and 1 Acrylic on Canvas measuring 20″ x 16″. All these smaller pieces are for my Solo Exhibition in Dallas opening March 12 at the Alan Barnes Fine Art

♦ Photographed all my latest finished work and documented everything.

♦ I was invited to have a Solo Exhibition also in March & April 2009 at Caesars Casino Windsor This is being organized in conjunction with the Arts Council Windsor Region.

♦  The Caesars Casino show requires large canvases. So I’ve also started work on 2 large 48″ x 48″ canvasses and 1 new 20″ x 20″ canvas.

♦ Professional Photographer, Jonathan Taillefer from Montreal came in last week for the second time. He’s including me in a video project and book of photograhs of Canadian artists in their studio. Here’s a few shots.

Photo by Jonathan Taillefer

Photo by Jonathan Taillefer

Photo by Jonathan Taillefer