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Something totally unexpected happened the other week.

 An opportunity arose to put on an exhibition with some friends in the Law Library (The Irish Bar Council), where Irish barristers and judges have their offices. The area is brightly lit and spacious, and barristers are good potential clients. Previous exhibitions have supposedly done very well there. 

I always remember Katherine Tyrrell’s advise  (of Making a Mark blog) “to hold an exhibition where the people who can afford to buy your paintings live” (or work), so fingers crossed, this could be worthwhile. However it’s only five weeks away and I have nothing prepared. Five weeks is really very, very soon. 

We went for a coffee to mull things over and decided that it is simply too good an opportunity to let pass. Between us we have enough art to make this an interesting and varied exhibition, and so the planning for the Natural Law botanical art exhibition began.

There are five of us involved- Yanny Petters, Lynn Stringer, Holly Somerville , Elizabeth Prendergast and me.

 Although I personally haven’t had a lot of experience in organising exhibitions, all of these artists are well versed in everything that needs to be done. They have all been very involved in both the Bloom Botanical Art exhibition, and  Aibitir, the ISBA’s Irish Alphabet in botanical art.

Well, there really isn’t a whole lot of time and being as it will be at the end of November, I’m going to work on some small paintings. Liz sells a lot of work, and she suggested doing lots of small affordable paintings, ones that could used as Christmas gifts. From her experience, paintings that have an emotional attachment tend to sell first, eg. a single flower (especially pink ones), dandelion clocks, apples, blackberries, even conkers. The weird and wonderful that we botanical artists like to draw usually doesn’t. Leaves, despite the pretty autumnal colours, also don’t tend to sell. Liz often grumbles that people seem to think that the leaves just grow on the page and that all the hard work involved in painting them is often overlooked. Of course, we will also have some larger paintings to bring a little variety.

So now it’s a matter of getting my head down and getting some painting done. The next five weeks will fly by. I’ll post more details about the exhibition once all the details are finalised.