Long time; no see...

It's been ten months since my last blog, and eight of those we've been under lockdown due to the pandemic.   

Inevitably, things have slowed right down during this period. The studio in Haslingden has had to close its doors, although I've been working on and off in tidying the collection; trying to make more space; and hanging a new (sadly almost totally unseen) exhibition of some of Dave's small oil paintings. 

Sales have inevitably dropped right away, although interest has picked up again these past few weeks, which has been encouraging.

The annual Rossendale Art Trail for 2020 was cancelled because of the pandemic, and as a second-best we've created a new website - Rossendale Art Trail Online - at rossendalearttrail.org, which I spent much of the late summer designing. The Dave Pearson Studio features as an exhibition venue in its listings, although Dave Pearson is not included as it's very much a site for practicing artists. 

Scratching the surface

Sorry, not many blog entries recently - but things continue to move forward, with Julian and Jackie dealing with plenty of sales and other inquiries about Dave's work. I've been finding it hard to keep up with providing them with the necessary certificates of provenance and invoices. 

Cataloguing the collection continues spasmodically too, and we've almost reached number 1500 in the Catalogue of Work. This is slightly misleading as numbering started, I believe, at number 110, and then there has been a few spoiled entries - still it means at least 1300 works must have been catalogued - for many artists a life-times work. In Dave's case however this has hardly scratched the surface and probably represents considerably less than 10% of the work that the Trust holds. 

I cycled up to the studio today to measure some of the pieces that I needed to catalogue  - including the three heads in the previous blog. At first I couldn't find the green portrait, when I did I found that it actually looks more like this:

So apologies for the washed out image in the earlier blog - a reminder of how photographs can be actively misleading if they aren't carefully colour-matched. Something Margaret spends a lot of her time  doing. 

A Christmas lull

Despite the belief that some small jobs would continue, things have pretty much ground to a halt as I've spent the past week snowbound. Even walking down the road to the pub has become a mini-epic. Still, I did make a concerted effort on Wednesday to venture out and gather Christmas goodies.

After digging the car out a snow-drift, I called in at the studio to distribute various paintings that were being collected by their purchasers after the opening weekend. The walls of 54 are now almost empty, a sign of how much of Dave's work was sold over the weekend. I've been able to bank most of the money from those sales and it cannot be stressed enough just what a relief it is to have built up the Trust's financial reserves again just as things were looking like we would hit problems in 2010.