It has been awhile since my last entry but things with the gallery are moving very quickly. People have quit and people have joined. Oh and one member has been ousted. A lot of internal reasons that seem to be more personal than organizational. I have been appointed ( acting) with a full vote in June for the Board and I am the Chair of the fund raising committee. I have mentioned this before but it is becoming more and more important. We had our first gallery members meeting last night and a lot of the members showed. A few want to be members and some of the Board members. We are about to open the new gallery having moved it from the Skyforest location to the Lake Arrowhead Village proper. There are tons more people that will flow through and we are all thinking it will be very good for business.
There are two ladies that have been striving to repaint the walls in the new gallery and I have been enlisted as the final say or an "experienced" person who should have a say. We – the members – voted on a color last night and the two ladies went to get it and they did a test on a section. I got a call this morning to please come and look, there was a problem. The color was off from what we thought we were painting and I agreed we had to make a change. When I got there the two ladies and another member had asked the manager of the Kincaid gallery, this is in reality not a Kincaid gallery but a gallery with other artists that uses (and probably pays) Kincaid for the use of his name for her "expertise. I was put off by this immediately and wanted this woman gone. She is in fact our competition. She immediately launches into her credentials as a TV commercial director, "This is my real job" she tells me and I know color. Well that about did it for me and as I am very careful not to flaunt my CV I had to dispatch her quickly and trumped her experience with my own. I lost control. Not a good thing, but the members that were part of the coop didn’t seem to mind.
I spent more time with the ladies and we all went back to the paint company and got a couple more quarts of new colors that we hoped were closer to the idea we had all voted on and ran back to the gallery and I threw up just a few small areas to see and we got one we all agreed was going to be just what we originally wanted. Whew. Tomorrow we paint. I said to the two ladies at the paint store they were relying on my opinion that would ultimately get me removed from the group and after having been here only four months. One of them said absolutely not, they want me to be President.
We will see.
