So now it’s all over – the show is down and finished.
It has been a tremendous focus of energy for the last couple of months.
For instance:
Endless emails flying back and forth.
Designing and printing the invites, posters and flyers.
Allocating jobs and drawing up the rotas for sittings.
Organising the private view.
Choosing the hanging team – decisiveness being a key attribute, no ditherers allowed.
Getting the sales desk together – cash box, credit card machine, invoice book.
And so on and on – you get the picture….
Then there’s the small matter of keeping a disparate group of artist-exhibitors happy and still talking to one another at the end of it all. I’m thinking of those little niggles that can become open warfare before you know it.
For instance:
The polite but steely comments to a fellow exhibitor on how much space that particular piece of work of theirs takes up (less than polite when out of ear shot, obviously).
The jostling for the best wall spaces and then discussing who has crammed their work in (to the detriment of said work, obviously).
The all important question of who will sell and what (it doesn’t matter how friendly we normally are with our fellow exhibitors, a great deal of surreptitious totting up goes on in the vicinity of the sales book, again obviously).
Oh, the drama of it all – I love it…..