Multiple goals

A very productive day; no proverbs but plenty learning. Latest rule of painting business, which merely reiterates the point I made a week ago about non-ability to see the future: watch your back. Not in the same way as you would if you were on a battlefield or in a dark alley, but in terms of not fixating on one goal when others are all around you. This ain't no football field (thank the merciful gods), there are goals all around, and all need watching.

Obscurity aside, what this actually means is that while concentrating on the new gallery taking my work, another one pops up and says 'Hello, sold all your stuff, can we have some more please?' Plans for the day are immediately altered to incorporate checking out frame and giclee print prices, as I am down to my last eight frames and someone just ordered six.

This sudden activity is of course very good and means that I will be paid for something artistic at last; this year has been all mouth and no trousers on the money front. Last year I sold heaps out of restaurants, and this one I have been gathering galleries to show my work but selling little... hopefully this is the turn of the tide. Not that I entirely believe in such matters, but it is a pretty nifty full moon coming up which us goats are supposed to find just that; tide turning.

And so to the auction house. Stapled my painting into a sheet to save on bubble wrap, screwed on the fixings and whacked it in the car - just fits and no more- and off we go. Of course when I got there the darn thing wouldn't come out for love nor money, but I was expecting it this time; I tried the same thing a couple of years ago at the gallery on the Mound and looked like a total loon for fifteen minutes battling with it before it popped out. Calm and cool this time, I just wiggled gently until it freed itself; last time it was actually a different picture, same frame, as I overpainted it as a budget exercise and because the old painting was a dog. Not of a dog, but a badly drawn and conceived piece that was best consigned to an underlayer.

Besides thinking it was huge, the ladies receiving didn't give me too much cause for paranoia and the building / hanging space is fantastic; very swanky and at the end of a lovely New Town street.

Spent the afternoon painting and printing frames and mounting up pictures for what is essentially my first re-order, so a party atmosphere prevailed despite Twig's attempts to cover herself in paint and the paint in hair. I often worry about what framers think when I drop off hairy-edged boards; I do try to remove it all but you know how cat hair is. Persistent and omnipresent. I was at a show recently and was delighted to see that the professional and established artist's painting was sporting animal hair worked in with the paint - it really is unavoidable.

Now, to the studio - using up some valuable potatoes which will start going crispy if I don't print them, which will make me feel wasteful for cutting them and not letting them leave their mark on my paintings! No potato shall die in vain on my watch; apart from the ones I eat for dinner.