Task 27/30: Have an "Open Studio"
Complete: November 30, 2008
I am sort of a homebody. A messy homebody at that. Also, my house is a bit of my sanctuary. It does not look like an IKEA catalog. I collect things and I like my sentimental nature of displaying them. I have lived in my beautiful apartment for 5 years now, and over the course of that time, I have shuffled, rearranged, bought, thrown away and cleaned so many times I lost count. Always with this goal of having an adult house that people could come visit, but never actually reaching that goal. Until recently. Billed as potentially the final task in this project, I invited everyone I knew, including bravely my entire building, to an Art and Photography Vodka Spectacular and opened up my home to any that wanted to drop by.
It was a fairly stressful mission for me to even commit to the idea without a clean house and prints that impressed me, feeling a bit shy about my paintings being enough to hold the show. But an invitation had to be sent far enough in advance that people could plan, so I went ahead and sent it. By making the event more about the socializing and the open house and house warming instead of the art and photography, I took a bit of the pressure off of myself to really wow people with my work. It still had me up until 3am the night before moving around things and tidying up and still leaving things undusted and not perfect, but better than ever before. In order to motivate myself to finish the cleaning, I first hung the prints that I had ordered and slipped into the mattes, which ended up looking amazing pinned to the walls. Armed with every vodka mixer imaginable, some suggested cocktails and an apartment that was set to display my creative nature, I opened my door.
I am a very lucky girl that I have so many supportive and amazing friends that came out to spend the afternoon with me and gander at my things. It was a lovely turnout with quite a successful set of sales, including the 2 paintings above. It was 4 hours of conversation and good times over yummy drinks. (Absolut Peach Lemonade and Pear Vodka with Sprite were the clear favorites but found a new fan for the Mango Black Pepper vodka that doesn't really appeal to me personally.) It was nice to have people in my space and not feel amazingly anxious about it the entire time, and it really seemed to be as the day really was what the project was supposed to be all about. I pushed myself to do something that I normally wouldn't do, and learned a lot about myself in the process. It was nice having some of the neighbors over and bonding with them more, and being able to share with everyone a bit more who I really am. My house is a large representation of who I am, and it was neat to see people embrace it. Unfortunately, this was not the last task of the project, but a successful celebration of the project anyway! I'm very proud that this task can now be called MISSION COMPLETE.
Below are just a few of the selection of images that I chose to have printed in various sizes for my show, mostly old hits:
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