I Love My Job

Fri­day night was the open­ing recep­tion for Mis­sion Open Stu­dios at Art Explo­sion, where I keep my stu­dio. The last cou­ple of weeks have been a fren­zy of prepa­ra­tion, and the last cou­ple of days espe­cial­ly so. I have a new large-for­mat pho­to­print called Immor­tal­i­ty and a new series of pho­tographs from a shoot on Mount David­son at night. The Mount David­son pho­tographs came back from Pho­toworks about an hour before the recep­tion opened and last night the wire that Immor­tal­i­ty was hang­ing by snapped. So in between restring­ing the frame with new wire, get­ting the last of the mats cut and hang­ing my work around the stu­dio, it’s been a fast-paced day.

Mis­sion Arts Foun­da­tion has done a great job of get­ting the word out. Sev­er­al of the stu­dios in the Mis­sion have done Open Stu­dios in the Spring in addi­tion to City-wide Open Stu­dios in the Fall, but this is the first year that it’s been coor­di­nat­ed between the stu­dios here. The house was packed last night; it was cer­tain­ly busier than the Fri­day night of Octo­ber’s Open Stu­dios. I can’t wait to see what Sat­ur­day brings. If noth­ing else it will be great to be able to talk to peo­ple about the work with­out being dis­tract­ed by get­ting the work on the walls.

I sold a Mount David­son pho­to, not one of the cross but from that same shoot. A fel­low from Vikki’s church seems very inter­est­ed in some of the cross pho­tos, and also sug­gest­ed that the church might want them.

I was on the cleanup com­mit­tee for Fri­day; I fig­ured I’d be bet­ter off get­ting my shift out of the way ear­li­er. The first thing we did after chas­ing every­one out of the build­ing was throw away all the food that had been opened. There was­n’t a lot of food actu­al­ly left over, but there were three bot­tles of apple or grape juice on the table, each more than two-thirds full. I must have looked sur­prised when I was told to toss them, because the coor­di­na­tor added, «or take it home, but we can’t keep the opened bot­tles here».

So my gross take for the night was forty dol­lars and three bot­tles of juice. All right, I’m not quite ready to retire yet! I’m real­ly not there to make mon­ey right now, but I am there to learn how to do this so that I can make mon­ey from it. Yeah, this is my job, and it’s a blast.

Which reminds me, I nev­er did write about the Mount David­son pho­to­shoot. It was anoth­er «I Love My Job» sto­ry but I’ll have to write about it some oth­er time. Right now it’s 3am and I have to be back at my job, which I love, in a few hours.

By the way, this week­end I have a free­bie give­away. I had small prints made of a pho­to I took of the Mount David­son Cross (pho­to can be seen accom­pa­ny­ing the post In Remem­brance) and I’m sign­ing them, dat­ing them, num­ber­ing them and giv­ing them to any­one who comes to vis­it the stu­dio. It’s fun giv­ing stuff away, and hope­ful­ly it reminds peo­ple of me afterward.