It’s Wednesday, the day before we launch the Artizan Summer Open 2018 exhibition at our incredible Fleet Walk venue. I’m sat in the space now (6 days in and we finally remembered to bring down some chairs and a desk!) writing this and looking around at the transformation of what this time last week was just another empty retail space on the Torquay high street…
And what a transformation!
It’s been a lot of long nights, many cups of a coffee (and a few beers we’re not going to lie) and having Greggs next door is going to absolute ruin us for the Summer…but, we’re nearly there. Today and tonight comes the final push.
So, when we last updated you the work was steadily flowing in. We’d just celebrated the launch of our other incredible Summer Exhibition, Portraits to Abstraction up at the main gallery which is now its second week, and we were just coming to the end of our maintenance on the space.
The weekend saw most of the art finish arriving. We got some great responses from the artists as they delivered and saw how the maintenance had gone, and we sent everyone off with fistfuls of invites to distribute on their travels; some are even making it as far as Cornwall!
On Sunday night, we started to hang the show. This was the first of the late-night stints and we left at 2am with a lot of layout prep done and the first work going onto the walls. Monday we were then back in bright and breezy at 10am for more art deliveries and we really knuckled down to the final layouts.
As Tuesday rolled in we enlisted the assistance of a good friend of ours Mark Hoyle, who very kindly gave us use of his trailer to get some furniture down to the space. Three trips in total to do the job; plinths, sideboards, easels, browsers, chairs and a desk are now all in and roughly located and its amazing how much more this feels like a space now…
We also had the wonderful Ziggy in during the day, a local poet who often joins us for our events at the gallery. He stopped by a couple of times to assist us with the hang and it makes an amazing difference having an extra pair of hands to help pass wires and artwork up the ladder. The result was a slightly earlier night, and we were all back to our beds before 1am miraculously.
With no artwork due in this morning we also had a slightly later start to the day. The team reconvened just after 9 this morning and partook in some more Greggs coffee as we set out the final list of jobs before launch tomorrow.
Which brings us to about here. I’m sat in the venue, with just one side of A4 in front of me holding the few final jobs before we open. It’s definitely going to be another long night, but the end is in sight, and we can’t wait to welcome you all tomorrow evening!
We are of course also still celebrating the exceptional exhibition of Alan Price-Roberts work up at the gallery. His show is really keeping our spirits up; as we run on sugar, caffeine and very little sleep, the sanctuary of our gallery and Alan’s work is some of the best medicine we could hope for, we really couldn’t have asked for a better show right now. You can find Alan’s work in the Summer Open Exhibition too and its also over at the Devon Art Society Summer Exhibition until the end of this week; he’s everywhere this Summer!
Following Alan’s show we’re also gearing up for three more Summer exhibitions. Immediately after, you’ll have just one week to catch Lyndsay James in the gallery, definitely not one to miss (more info here)! Then we’ll move on to our August show with exclusive new abstracts from Douglas Bardrick (for his exhibition head here)! And finally we’ll wrap up August with a short group show from Creative Coverage Members, an exceptionally talented agency of artists from across the UK (and there information can be found here).
And that is us about up-to-date. We launch tomorrow so make sure your keeping your eye on our social media and hopefully we’ll see you in one of our two Summer spaces soon!