Breakfast Blog

Yesterday I installed my show at LynnArts.  It was a good day, productive and crisis-free.  All paintings arrived at the gallery unscathed, nothing fell off the wall, and there were very sweet interns there to help me.  The space has great light and interesting architectural details.  My show faces out onto the street, and passersby stopped to peek in, wave, smile, and give me the thumbs up.  As mentally exhausted as I was at the end of the day, I left the gallery full of warm fuzzies.  My one regret is that I failed to realize that there are windows on the actual walls of the gallery space.  You can see one in this image.  There's another, beautiful arched one on the other side of Fish Rain and one long, vertical one at the very top of the wall, but I didn't get pictures of those.  I can't, for the life of me, figure out how I missed the existence of these windows, except that the artist who was showing when I first went to visit the space must have covered them with some big paintings.  In any case, if I had realized the windows were there, I would have created some kind of site-specific piece to interact with them.  I'm dreaming about long cut- paper vines hanging down from the ceiling, veiling the windows, but not hiding them.  Kind of like strange, human-made ivy covered walls.  I've had two shows now–this one, and the one at the Belmont Gallery of Art–where I wish I had taken more full advantage of the particularities of the space.  In the future I will be sure to investigate these things more carefully!  Ah well, here are some more views of the show:
Setting my delightful experience at LynnArts aside, I have decided that the city of Lynn must surely be the catcall capital of the universe.  I am not even kidding.  And it wasn't just that I accidentally parked next to a barber shop outside of which legions of young men appeared to congregate for hours on end.  There were also creepy comments from even creepier middle aged men in passing cars, and there was a lot of honking, waving and hollering out of car windows.  I found the whole experience mystifying.  If all of these *cough* "gentlemen" expend this amount of energy on a woman walking down the street with messy hair, flip flops, bermuda shorts and a t-shirt, what happens when they see a woman wearing a dress?  Do they spontaneously combust?  Now that would be something to see.  

While I found the catcalling men of Lynn uncomfortably absurd, here's something that I am finding delightfully absurd:
This is the second book in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime Series.  I read the first one, The Big Over Easy a couple of weeks ago and I highly recommend them both.  They are perfect end-of-summer reading books.  Especially if your early summer reading list included A Thousand Splendid Suns and Plague of Doves, both of which are amazing, but in no way embody the kind of light, hammock lounging, beach sprawling breeziness that normal people associate with summer reading.  

You might have noticed the above reference to end-of-summer.  Sorry, but it's true.  Not only are my mom's dahlias in full swing:

But the leaves are already beginning to change, the air is getting crisp at night, and I've seen several big V's of Canadian Geese on the move.  So for those of you who love summer best, my condolences.  And for autumn-lovers like myself, wahoo!