Gallery Experience

On Wednesday I attended a gallery opening at a gallery my friend works for. Though the gallery is very new, I'd attended some gallery events before. However this was the first where I had actually had artwork in the show.

RAD!, currently in the gallery. It's a paper cutting.

It's a very weird experience. My friend had asked me to send in my art, so I did. I didn't really think that much of it, even though I spent like 30 hours on the pictures and even longer on finding frames. Despite doing all this crap I never really thought of myself as an "artist". I was a writer, maybe, not really. The main reason I could never think of myself as an artist was because I never really prioritized making art. I prioritized school, which after elementary school had nothing to do with art, I prioritized writing, sometimes probably more than I should, but I always thought of art as more of a hobby than anything that could be anything more. I enjoyed looking at all of the art there and was very impressed by a lot of them (particularly Bly and Rowan Pope -- even though only Bly was in the show I've seen both of their works, and they're amazing). It felt weird because I did not have a lot of the 'art school experience' a lot of the younger artists in particular had, and also I have no fondness for paint and could not relate to a lot of the media troubles most everyone else had as painters.

Now that I've done it once I do want to try again, even though framing in particular is hell. It's the same as writing, I guess. Make more and more and more, and submit, submit, submit. Maybe I will post more art here, sometime. It's not like writing where putting it somewhere makes it unsubmittable, I think.