Black & Blues

Coming up in a scant two weeks: linocuts on parade at the Salida Café. Show goes up November 6, reception Saturday, November 8, from 4-6. The DM will provide music and if you're early enough there will be snacks.

There's so much to do before the start of an exhibition. This one has the added challenge of engineering a new hanging system!

The Salida Café (known to locals as Bongo's) is actually a great venue: lots of traffic, engaging atmosphere. But it's tricky to hang work there. The walls are soft old brick and the ceiling is high (this once was a feed store), so there's the good old-fashioned picture rail system. There's a strip of moulding that runs around the walls, about 8 feet from the floor. To hang art one puts a hook on the moulding and drops a wire to the framed work. It's not great.... work tends to tip out from the wall at the top, and hanging it STRAIGHT can be a real challenge. Not so bad for big stuff... but THIS time I have 16 tiny linos to exhibit. In frames they're only 11" x 11" each and they don't weigh much. I foresee 16 different hanging heights and some serious wobble factor.

So... enter the need for engineering. I think what I'm going to do is get some nice 1"x 8" boards, cut them the width of the wall sections, paint them brick color, and hang THOSE from the picture rail... straight down from their top edges. Then I'll mount the framed linos on the boards instead of hanging them from individual wires. In theory it seems like it will work. Stay tuned, as this week the experimenting begins.