Slides of The New Creative Artist

The program I gave last night for the Western Ohio Watercolor Society in Springfield was a little weird. There was a good crowd of forty or so, considering that a competing workshop in Fairborn kept several people from getting to the meeting. The room was totally unsuitable for a slide presentation. The Springfield Museum of Art is a great place, but they weren't overly accommodating to the WOWS group. Since the group was founded there more than twenty years ago there had always seemed to be a rapport, but something is missing now. The room was set up for a breakfast meeting and we had to rearrange the seating as best we could. There was only a card table for the slide projector, not high enough, so someone found a rickety utility table in the kitchen that worked out. The west wall of the room is all windows and doors. There are heavy shades for the windows and above the doors, but I suppose safety regs prohibit shades across the doors. I wonder why they don't put individual mini-blinds or shades on those doors. This being daylight-savings time here, the sun shone brightly through the doors and almost totally washed out the slides on the huge screen. People were kind, oohed and ahed appropriately at the slides of some of the exciting work in my new book. But I was very disappointed that they couldn't have seen a better presentation. The moral to this story: before agreeing to do a slide presentation anywhere, make sure the facility has a suitably dark room, a projector table, extension cords and a projector. (I had to take my own. A museum doesn't have a projector? Please....) WOWS provided me with a portable mike and that was a big help. I can remember when the museum was an art center and they used to set up audio-visual aids for WOWS meetings. Times have changed, I guess.