Creative Marathon: The Day After
What can I say other than wow! The marathon was nothing short of amazing! If you’re not familiar with what it is, well it’s shakes down like this. Artists have 24 hours to create works in any media around a supporting theme for a gallery show the very next day. The work is sold and the proceeds go towards the development of the treehouse.
Friday at 8PM artists started to filter in and set up camp. It didn’t take long for the creativity to start flying either. There were paintings, sculputures, scratch boards, sketches, canvases, and you could feel the creative energy feeding off of one another. Burn energy drink was flying off the shelf and our first round of Vocellis pizza arrived just in time for the big registration rush.
Things started to settle down around 10pm which is when we fired up the big screen with all kinds of award winning music videos. Thanks Andy!! Thats when I started to sketch out my painting.
From 11pm - 4 am most of the artist got down to business. The room had a collective focus about it. Outside of a few informal critiques and bathroom trips the entire room was in the zone. It kind of reminded me of working on final projects at the end of the term, only we were all doing in on purpose… and for fun.
Around 5:30 to 6:00 am I hit a wall and I went home for a quick nap, shower, and change of clothes. I got back to the treehoue at 10:00 am to find some artists still working while others found the nearest couch and crashed.
I spent most of the morning filling out a spreadsheet and configuring the numbers for the event. As I entered each name I grew happier and happier. I knew we had a good turnout, but I wasn’t prepared for what I discovered.
Check out some of these stats!!! We had 30 out 34 RSVPS show up. Which is fantastic! But that’s not all. We also had 40 Walk-ins!!! Which is a grand total of 70 participating artists. I polled as many of them as I could and the number one way they found out about the event was word of mouth. Followed by the website, craigslist, then myspace.
I was so happy that I had a delicious muffin and coffee from another one of our gracious sponsors, affagoto.
When I looked even closer I found out we had a wide variety in age. Our youngest artist was 3 and our eldest was 70. I honestly didn’t expect such a wide diversity and I’m totally pumped about it.
Around 3:00ish most of us started to slowly finish up our works and began the transformation of workspace to gallery space. It started with a LOT of cleaning and moving things around. So after a few hours we had a PA, horderves, nicely displayed artwork (Thanks Rich and Ali!), a clean gallery, and a few last minute things to get ready.
The doors were set to open and some curious people started to filter in about an hour before the show started. Which was when the first piece was sold. My “No Girls Allowd” piece. From that point on I was totally encouraged about what was to transpire that evening.
Then BOOM!!!! All of these people started to come through the door, and most of them I’d never seen before. The bands started to set up and then it was speech time. You can check it out at stbd.tv. Thanks Justin! You’re totally awesome!!!
Some other band went of first and then the show was off and running. People everywhere!!! I sold some more art, met lots of great people, and I had an amazing time. John Miller went on next followed by Sean Atkins, and the room was buzzing. The next thing I know its around 11:30 and most everyone had taken off for the evening and we sold 7 pieces.
Honestly, I’m still in shock at the turnout. Around 150 + turned out to see the artwork. This is the closest count I could get from the guest book and the artist registration. I know there were more people that didn’t sign in but I can with confidence say that 150 were at the Creative Marathon Gallery show. Which means TOTALLY AWESOME!!! Thank you so much to everyone for coming out to support the art scene in Bellevue!!
And thank you to our sponsors Burn, Affagoto, Pat Catans, and Vocelli’s Pizza. Another special shoutout goes to Rachel, Jesse, Justin, Andy, Victoria, Sam, Gondeck, Mosley, Gary, Bodnar, Shank, Deef, Erik, Kookie, SOB, John Miller, Sean Atkins, Rich, Ali, and everyone who came to the treehouse!!!
This event went over a million times better than I could have ever hoped. Thank you all for making this happen.
For more information go to www.creativetreehousepgh.com
March 4th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
All these years, and you still spell my last name wrong =(
mattgondEK.com