We spent the better part of the next two days at our house furiously creating art, from your typical sketches and paintings to intricate shadow boxes (or as intricate as we could get using old shoe boxes and dime store construction paper). Now that we had the art, plans went into effect for our gala opening. We chose a date and venue (the next day and our backyard) and set to work curating and hanging the art. Curating was easy, we divided the artwork up by subject matter: Nature Art, Ship Art, Dinosaur Art*, Flower Art and the ubiquitous catchall: Art.
*A side note on the Dinosaur Art: it was all mine. Even though, throughout most of my childhood, horses were my artistic subject of choice, there was a time in second grade when I went through what I like to call my "Dinosaur Period". This was not unlike Picasso's "Blue Period". During that time, I could whip out a likeness of any dinosaur from an Ankylosaurus and Stegosaurus to the more familiar Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex. This detour in my career may have been due to the fact that the first love in my life, school mate Lyndon Cochran, was also an aficionado of dinosaurs but that's a story for another time. It's just a happy accident of fate that we produced our art show during this time otherwise the Dinosaur Art phase of my career would have been buried in the annals of history.
Hanging the art was a bit trickier. We had few vertical surfaces (trees) in our backyard for suspending the art and Dad was not to keen on us pounding nails into the trees willy nilly and tape was out of the question (Have you ever tried to scotch tape paper to a tree? It is not happening.). We needed some sort of surface (wood) that we could nail or pin our art to (scrap wood) and be portable enough to place around our backyard for display (scrap wood from Dad's shop!). After promising to return every bit of scrap wood, sans nails, when our show ended its run, we raced to my Dad's shop and found our hanging surfaces.
While the decorating committee went about carefully hanging the show, the publicity committee set about creating and delivering the gala invitations. No common, pre-printed invitations for us! Each invitation was lovingly hand calligraphed in crayon on fine, school grade construction paper and then delivered via Schwinn bike (no helmet required, gasp! it was 1968 afterall.) to the recipient's mailbox. Many gala events also feature swag bags for the attendees. As we had no swag, or bags for that matter, we chose small bunches of flowers carefully gathered the day before the event from our garden (yes, we asked Mom); each with a scrap of tin foil binding the stems together to add a bit of flourish. In addition to the flowers, Jimmy's mom made us cookies to offer our guests.
At last we were ready, the art had been created and hung and the invitations delivered. The day of the art show dawned fine and clear. We set up a small card table near the front gate leading from the driveway to our yard. On it lay the miniature bouquets in their crinkled, foil wrappers next to a plate of homemade cookies. Boo, being the youngest of us, was given the job of handing out a bouquet to each mom as she walked into the show. And what a show it was as our parents and neighborhood friends walked around admiring our efforts. The local press was on hand to document the event as evidenced by the photo above (that's me on the far left.) In our minds, the show was a resounding success. It was every bit as good as art shows that took place in fancy galleries and museums in the big city. All it took was a little imagination.
THE OLSEN BARN, CHESTER, CA
14x11 inches, oil on linen canvas, 2019
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The Olsen Barn, Chester, CA - auction ends on Sunday, July 26th at 10:00am PST.
This is the iconic Olsen barn located in Chester, California on the shores of Lake Almanor. It sits flanked by a large Cottonwood tree with the setting sun casting shadows on it’s gnarled exterior.