Grace's Graphic Design Blog

I have my first real gallery showing tomorrow. This time my paintings will be offered for sale. It’s a smallish gallery, but you have to start somewhere, right? I’m nervous, not because I don’t think my work is really good, but that no one will be interested in buying it. Especially because they are priced so high. I’ve been selling my paintings since I was around 16, but this is a whole other league. The gallery owner says you have to think big, that the collectors you want to reach will just sniff at something that’s “priced like a paint by numbers thing” (her words). She says I should work hard at closing on just one piece, and that once I have a red sticker other buyers will take a closer look at my unsold paintings because someone else thought it was worth having. Time to get to the gallery for an all-nighter of prep work. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. Think big $$$$.

Five years from now, I will have graduated from Temple University. I don’t know where I will be in terms of my art, but I know I want to want to make a contribution and bring something of myself to the world of art. Maybe I will be offering private art lessons to students, because I have always enjoyed working with younger kids. I will most likely be living in an apartment either in Baltimore, MD (where I’m from), or Philadelphia depending on job opportunities. It’s hard to say where I will be in 5 years from now but I’m hoping I will be more confident and happy person.

We take and send selfies to our friends to share what we are feeling at the moment. But pictures are do not explain themselves. Different people view them differently. And are they really honest? Instead of telling our friends how we feel, we send them a picture of ourselves posing as happy, goofy, thoughtful, etc. Words are needed to really explain things, like how we feel and what we think. Trump keeps tweeting and issuing pics and videos, many of which contain outright lies. People who object respond with the same burst of spectacle. The subject is changed and people move on to other spectacles. The way news and politics is handled in the media, especially social media, often doesn’t allow time for a real in depth discussion. So how do you get people to look beyond spectacle and have a real dialogue.