Inhale, and..

' The deep breath before the plunge'; that's the quote I've been thinking about for the last week and it finally found me- I couldn't remember it or where it was from but it was hovering on the fringes of my memory. Then we decided to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy over lord knows how many nights (having no TV means that we often slap in a DVD to watch on the laptop over dinner) and lo and behold, on about day five I found the scene with Gandalf leaning on the ballustrades of Minas Tirith (no idea how you spell it) debating the impending final showdown with Mordor. So... that is how I am feeling this week. That's what that whole paragraph was about. Deep breath - pause before shows opening, Plunge - shows opening and result being somewhere between lots and nothing. Read a wise article a while ago that told me not to expect the great dramatic moment where someone shows up and announces that I am the new messiah, or similar, but to enjoy the drip, drip of small and encouraging moves onward and upward towards my goal. Wise indeed. Earlier this year I was soooo excited to have some pictures in a gallery window for the first time; my first official solo gallery show last year was a bit of an anticlimax through no-one's fault but my own overblown expectation. The guy with the messiah announcement didn't show up, not many others did either and the event sunk without trace. Or did it...? The point, I think, is that it taught me things that I built on over the following months, it instructed me in areas of gallery ettiquette and lingo that I was previously unaware of and it gave me a really good long breathing space on my own to look at the big picture, not the piddly detail right in front of my nose.

So essentially I will try very hard not to be disappointed whatever befalls me and my work this autumn, but try to wait and see how the experience pans out in the longer term.

Tomorrow I'm off to deliver the first five paintings to the Number Four gallery in St Abbs, so the plunge begins.