The pack...

I visited the studio in Haslingden an hour or so ago where Julian and Jackie, helped by Andre and Mariana, our Portuguese theatre students here on placement, were busy wrapping everything in sight in bubble-wrap. Tomorrow Julian and Chris Pearson load the truck and then Julian drives down to Bermondsey with the exhibition.  

Mick Bateman has emailed to say that everything is in place at the Project to receive the work, and when Margaret arrives on the 10th the hang will begin. Meantime, I'm off for a short break in Cascais (where Andre and Mariana are at theatre school). Mick has also listed the publicity that Crisis have been undertaking, in addition to my own efforts. This is all very encouraging and the fact that the Bermondsey Project is also expecting to launch its own website in a few days time is also a boost to our effort to publicise the show.

Not especially related to anything current are the three very tiny oil paintings of Mummers done by Dave in the 1970s when he was researching English calendar customs. I really like these little paintings, and they show a very different side to Dave's work than the pieces we'll be showing in Bermondsey. 

Almost ready to go

Julian Williams has the artwork ready to leave Rossendale and head for the Bermondsey Project gallery in London next weekend. One room (above) at Dave's old studio in Haslingden has all the paintings selected by Margaret Mytton and Edward Lucie-Smith stacked, ready waiting to be wrapped and then loaded onto the truck for delivery. There are also halogen lamps in case we require additional lighting, protective packaging, hanging plates, and touch-up paint (for the walls - not the paintings). 

Margaret and our designer Ric are on to the last stages of preparation for the catalogue before it goes to the printer, and I'm working on designs for the invitation and collating, with Julian, the up-dated mailing list so that everyone who needs to gets an invite. 

Mail-out

Last week we mailed out to our list of friends, followers and other contacts at the Dave Pearson Trust. Sorry, the version below is probably too small to read, but double-click on it and you should be able to see a larger, clearer version:

Today we're approaching being a month away from the opening of the 'Byzantium and Beyond' show in Bermondsey. Suddenly London seems an awful long way away to us, and our concern is that because we're based in the North-West of England attendance at the gallery Preview will be low. Of course we've been aware of this issue for a long time and have been making plans. The first piece of the jig-saw has been to create databases of friends, contacts, galleries, press, and other potentially interested parties. The mail-out above was the first part of putting this in place, and at the same time we also sent out a more informative mail-out to the press.

Next we've hired a small local company to handle the mail-outs, including adding a form on the front page of the Dave Pearson website for new people to subscribe. I've also looked at advertising. This is a problem area for us, as advertising rates are very high, way out of our league, so we've tried to create interesting editorial copy, hoping that the press will find Dave's story and the story of us setting up the Trust of interest and run an article. Finally we're hoping that friends and other contacts based in London, including of course the Crisis charity, who run the Bermondsey Project gallery, will help us send out word of the exhibition.

If anyone reading this blog is interested and wishes to receive an invitation to the exhibition, simply go to the Dave Pearson website at www.dspearson.org and complete the very simple form at the top right of the front page. You'll then receive our mail-outs. Many thanks.

Fun with Spam

Margaret has been creating a number of details (including the three above) from the Byzantium series of paintings that will be on show in London and then passed these on to Julian so he has photographs available should there be any responses to the Press Releases that are going out next week.

One thing to slightly delay things is that the company handling our mail-outs ran the texts of both the press release and the general bulletin through a Spam Checker (to make certain that our emails weren't directed into recipient's spam boxes), and they managed to achieve a score of 8.6. Anything over 5.0 is considered by the programme to be potential spam and thus likely to be promptly deflected from any Inbox worth its salt. This was all news to me; but apparently it's  based on identifying certain spam-sensitive words - so that the words 'exhibition' and 'painting', for example, score highly on the 'highly dubious' scale and thus help condemn any emails containing them to the spam box. 'Film' appears to be a dangerous word, whereas 'movie' is OK. Odd!

So time was taken by our friendly mail-out agency to re-write the releases in a spam-friendly way. It's actually quite hard to send out notice of an exhibition of paintings when both of the key words are among the main culprits. But they did it, with a final score of only 3.0!

Portraits and a poster

It's been a weekend of work on our Press Release, the mailing list and on the catalogue for the Bermondsey exhibition. 

Some changes to the planned catalogue have been agreed by Margaret Mytton and Edward Lucie-Smith, and we've also been discussing the poster design. Two blogs ago, on Sunday 12th February, I focused on the 'signature' image to help us promote the show:

That self-portrait, an old favourite of mine, was used in the very first short monograph we created, shortly after the formation of the Dave Pearson Trust. Margaret has been a little concerned that it may be over-familiar to some people, so the  possibility of using an alternative image - or even two different images - has arisen. The portrait at the top of the page is suggested as that alternative. 


So we're now having an amicable debate about the merits of the two images to publicise the show; or do we use both? Any strong feelings one way or the other out there? We would be interested to hear them...