Saturday, July 24 will go down in history as the day yours truly opened his mouth, started to speak and then continued on and on and on for a full 25 minutes. And to a crowd of people too.
Strangely enough, they all listened to me for that whole time, no slow hand clapping to be heard, and I even received a standing ovation as Malcolm said afterward - I replied, true but they were already on their feet - no chairs.
The speech was for the opening of 'Harvey Schiller and Friends at The Rising Sun SALA Exhibition'. SALA stands for South Australian Living Artists. It's a festival held in the middle of winter to entice people out of their homes and into art galleries and other arty venues to look at artwork. It has its own catalogue and everything!
The exhibition I organised features eight artists plus me and will be up until September. I also organised a classical guitarist to play at the opening which added a bit of atmosphere. I have five pieces in it - there's a total of 30 pieces up on the wall, two painters, one mixed media, six photographers including me.
Earlier in the day when I wrote the notes for the speech I decided to say a bit about each artist, what I knew of their previous work, the work they had in the current exhibition, how I react to their work and then some information on
other places they have exhibitions or work on display. As you can see, if you do that eight times it could rack up the minutes. Still no slow hand clapping, or fainting so I suppose it was a success.
Two pieces were sold a the exhibition, one by Janine Matheson and one by Gary Campbell. It looks like I might have a sale too, but they don't want the one on the wall in the exhibition - it's too small! They want a big one!
After the exhibition we all trotted off to the Robin Hood for dinner. I had failed to book enough seats and a few people embarrassingly went their own way. Woops. Next time proper record keeping will be needed.
