Skip to main content

The Gallery

Hello again,
We have another mural update. JK, there’s really nothing left to say about the mural, so now we’re going to talk about all the other random (but mostly art-related) things happening in our lives. For example, this summer we became members at our town’s art gallery (theW Gallery in Wayland, check it out!), or, more specifically, we became chairs on the gallery board and are now in charge of running the student program/curating the student exhibit of the gallery. We were pretty psyched about doing this, but (obviously) we ran into some issues at first:

  • Even though we’ve been working with with the gallery over the summer, because their entire board had to agree on how the “student exhibit” of the gallery would run, we finalized the whole curating process pretty recently. As a result, we couldn’t get as many pieces as we wanted to from other art students at our school. We only had about 12 pieces to hang up on Friday, but hopefully we'll get more in the couple of weeks we have left before this exhibition officially opens.
  • When we got to the gallery to start setting up the show, Nancy Boyle, the president of the gallery, literally gave us the key and free reign over everything--so I guess we’re officially in charge now??? That’s not really an issue, except that we had some trouble remembering/ comprehending the many (many) instructions we were given all at once. Not to worry, we figured everything out … eventually. 
  • Deciding where all the actual art would go was surprisingly challenging (as I’m writing this I’m realizing that a lot of our blog talks about how surprised we are when things are challenging - seems like we have a tendency to underestimate the difficulty of everything). The way the gallery was already arranged looked really nice (see photos below) and we didn’t want to mess anything up, lest we destroy the good name of student artists everywhere. So, armed with our vast knowledge of interior design, natural intuition of good feng shui, and crippling anxiety over ruining the gallery forever, we tried to balance the art pieces that we had with the art pieces that were already up. We’ll tentatively admit that we actually started to get the hang of it after a while, and the final product was not a complete disgrace.

On a brighter note, the gallery is actually a super chill place to just hang out; we literally spent our entire day there, trying our best to be productive, but (if we're being honest) mostly just listening to light jazz music while sitting on one of the comfy therapy-style sofas and discussing fun, exciting things like:
  • How hard (every single one of) our classes can be
  • The depressive (but perhaps necessary) nature of mundane jobs
  • Jane Eyre, how to pronounce the name Jane Eyre, and the large number of socratic seminars we have had on Jane Eyre
  • The inevitable bias most teaches show in the way they lead their class
  • Great teachers
  • Great classes
  • Whether we think that truly great people are born or made
  • Sharpiegate
Yes, we know, we clearly lead riveting lives. Anyway, if people have the time, they should really visit theW gallery--we might be there!
CQOTD: “It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world."
Photos of the Wayland @wgallery, which were, in all honesty, stolen from the internet because Yana didn't bring her camera, but are still important because they show how pretty the gallery is and how sad it would be to ruin it:







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Golden Hour

So, as we previously mentioned, we’ve finally finished the mural -- a bittersweet ending. We won’t lie, it was not an easy project. It feels like we’ve spent a majority of our summer vacation at the school. We’ve had to spend a lot of money. We’ve been really tired. We’ve had to plan a lot (something that is definitely not our strong suit). On our final day, we started working at 1:00 and stayed until 12:30 in the morning trying to finish. And we haven’t even cleaned up yet, which will be a process in and of itself. But it’s there, isn’t it? It stands tall, it doesn’t look half bad, and we’ve had a real adventure doing it. We learned how to brew tea in the English office. We finally had our picnic. We tried to watch the sunset a bunch of times and just happened to miss it each time. We saw KR. We met Gustav. We even bumped into Ryan and his dog Luther on our last day. And when we finished yesterday, it really didn’t feel like the end. This process - going to an empty school, painting
1 comment
Read more

Tant Pis

Hello again. Every day we’re making progress on the mural, and by now we’re approximately a half of the way done-ish. Yesterday, Ms. Snow emailed us about the mural, which she recently saw, and was very posh and very British about it: “ The blue/ red skyline has translated most felicitously from your sketch to the wall, and the white childish figures are full of motion.” She also told us “Tant Pis” about the fact that we paid the sales tax on the 200$ worth of mural supplies even though the school should technically be exempt. Yana didn't realize that Tant Pis were actual words, even though Amelia tried to tell her exactly what it meant → that is regrettable, too bad. Classic miscommunication. Anyways, here’s a few more crucial updates on mural/ life progress.  1. Stars make everything better. The top half of our mural is supposed to be a galaxy (or at least galaxy inspired), which took us a little too long to figure out how to actually make. The final technique we settled on: A s
1 comment
Read more

Apocalypse Now

Hello people. Welcome to our blog. So... the background: earlier this year, Ms. Snow (English teacher) + Ms. Latimer (Art teacher) + Ms. O'Connell (Art teacher) proposed a competition, whereby any student could submit a proposal for a new mural in the English wing and they would choose the best design. We thought, "oh ok, this could be fun," and so we created a design, drew a sketch, typed up a writeup (started a writeup the night before and finished the block before, don't tell) and submitted the whole thing. The prompt was to "design a mural based on quotes from books." We both love C atcher in the Rye , so naturally our mural is based on Catcher. Here's the quote we used: “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around, nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if
1 comment
Read more