Yesterday I had a presentation at the gallery/museum where I currently have a solo wall exhibition. It was a requirement attached to having the spotlight on my art for two months in a very touristy town. A no-brainer! A while ago, I learned that the # 1 fear for most people is speaking in public. I don’t know if that is still true, but more than 30 years of teaching pretty much got rid of that fear for me. But I knew preparation was key, so I planned what my talk would be about, visited the site several weeks early to see the equipment on-site, and went back last week with my computer and presentation loaded onto it, to make sure everything worked. Planning takes away a lot of the stress. So I was surprisingly calm in the hours leading up to the presentation. I got there in plenty of time, even though I decided to make a last-minute change to my presentation. I have to mention that, because my portable computer is a Google Chromebook, I was using Google Slides, which I had very little experience with, but which is not that different from PowerPoint, which I had used (and taught) since the first version came out many many years ago. Slides is quite a bit simpler, with much fewer bells and whistles, which suited me fine. All I wanted was some bullet points to keep the presentation on track, lots of photos, and a couple of short videos. And of course, I would be presenting offline, i.e. no Internet. Now I don’t know if you know this, but the Chromebook is basically an online machine. Yes, you can use it offline, but it is really meant to be constantly connected. So I built my presentation, testing it as I went. When online it worked fine. Offline, not so much! Especially the videos. I researched and tried all kinds of ways to trick Slides into thinking it was online, but there was no way to play videos directly within the presentation. So I resorted to switching to a different window and just playing the downloaded videos from there. Easy peasy! And the photos I had in the presentation worked fine, so I was ready! Then the day before the presentation, I thought I should really add another photo early in the presentation, where I was talking about how making Christmas ornaments had gotten me back into art over 20 years ago. I didn’t want the audience to be picturing macaroni glitter-glued onto red cardboard with green bows, so I thought a photo of some of my ornaments would be a nice addition! So about 3 hours before the scheduled presentation, I found a photo I had taken a little while ago and added it to the presentation. And, of course, it wouldn’t work. I don’t remember if I had to do anything special to get the dozens of other photos to show up, but this one just wouldn’t. I tried a few more obvious things, but nothing doing! Time was moving on, so I had to give up on that idea and get to the venue. I must have anticipated this might happen because I had already packed a selection of ornaments in my “show and tell” bag of props. Once at the venue, I connected my Chromebook to the giant Smart TV, and waited for the crowd to appear. The lady running the gallery (who happens to be the person who bought one of my framed ACEOs before the show started) was happy to show me that four more of the framed ACEOs had sold, and sadly she had to let some of them go because the buyers were from out of town (for aesthetic reasons, they prefer to keep sold items on the wall for the duration of the show). So now my wall isn’t so pretty! I am prepared to live with that. So where is the crowd? A few people had told me they were looking forward to my presentation. Unfortunately, I guess something better came up because only a small handful of people showed up. But it was wonderful. They were very interested and asked great questions, which I was able to answer because the crowd was small. One of my goals for this presentation was to spread the word about Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) and Art Cards, Editions and Originals (ACEOs). I would absolutely love to start an artist card trading group. And I think I succeeded in stoking enough interest in the small audience to make that happen! I was asked If I would be available to do a workshop on the topic, which is a great start! Would I have wanted a “standing room only” crowd for my presentation? Of course! Would I have liked to have five of my larger paintings sold instead of the small ones? You bet! But I am thrilled with the result, and feel that I am one step closer to my goal of “connecting people through the magic of original art”!
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AuthorMy name is Claire Bureau. Archives
March 2023
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