Mar 10, 2009

Art beyond limitation

Without getting into a big drama about who forgot to schedule what deadline, the past couple days we've been scrambling around the house trying to build frames for three original canvases that have to ship Wednesday.

I'd stalled getting the works framed because, well, nobody's worse at choosing frames than me. I'm just terrible at it. But work for a national juried group show needs to look national caliber, so frame we must.

Philosophically, paintings are like boob jobs and frames are like apparel: you can toss on a t-shirt or slip into a sexy little off-the-shoulder number; it's still a boob job. But you wouldn't show up to the cotillion in the same clothes you wear to rake leaves so we went frame shopping on the fly and found no store in our area with ready made frames that would work. In a shop aisle decision we chose to buy frames larger than the works and cannibalize them with the compound miter saw to build our own from the materials, discarding the unused bits. (There are no wholesale framers in our area, only retail, so the markup for custom framing is ridiculous for an artist who is, essentially, buying a manufactured part for a product.)

My sweet hubby is doing all the measuring twice and cutting once since he's uncomfortable with my using the compound miter saw. He wouldn't even think about it if I weren't blind, but given how little I see he opts for the sensible. I guess he likes me with all ten fingers.

When it comes to chop saws, I hit a limit. "Art beyond limitation" doesn't mean I get superpowers. If I did get superpowers I'd definitely want to accessorize with a cape. Nothing says "superpowers" like a cape. "Art beyond limitation" has more to do with the transcendent quality of people coming together to achieve something none of them could do solo. Even a one-man play has a page of credits in the program.

I'm deeply appreciative of the people whose talents are making Art of Possibility Studios successful. It may be an obtuse reference, but with great optimism I recall Gary Larson's "The Far Side" cartoon with the two spiders and the web spanning the bottom of the sliding board, "If we pull this off, we eat like kings!"

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