Farrington Smith Gallery

We hung the first painting in the gallery yesterday.

It’s over by the door where it gets great sunlight, and it made us all happy to see it up there on the wall while we continue to work around it.

Adam fixed a glitch in the track lights today, so we shouldn’t have any problem making our goal to be open the first Saturday in August. Doug MacCash, the art critic for the Times-Picayune, did a little write up in last week’s Lagniappe about us closing the French Quarter place, so I thought we should have a concrete date for our reopening.

So now we have it- August 5th.

- Amy

I realized yesterday how long it’s been since I’ve made a post…can I blame it on the heat? Hmm…or the fact that Scott has been on a trip to London and Madrid for the last couple weeks? He’ll be back this weekend, so after this little breather, I think we will be kicking it into high gear. We are so close to having the gallery ready to go, but sometimes that’s the time you can lose a little momentum, isn’t it?

Just to make this post more interesting, I’m gonna throw in one of my current favorite paintings of Adam’s.

-Amy

On The Delta; Adam Farrington; Paint, Masonite and Steel

ETA: Adam wrote a little about On The Delta after he saw my post, so here it is:

It’s hard to imagine a property out of its current context. There are those ones scattered about that predate everything else around them. It’s strange to imagine them isolated, like the first seed to drop.

You know what they say about real estate: location, location, location. This place doesn’t have any of that, but luckily they also say if you build it they will come.

Territorial ambiguity makes for some dynamic tension; it can be like the three bears.

New Orleans has long inspired curious trespassing with all its strange vacant spaces, but it feels a lot less comfortable since Katrina. It’s different when you are familiar with the circumstances that forced the people out and left the doors ajar.

No One Home is pictured at night, maybe illuminated in firelight. Perhaps a party house in one of those broken bottle zones, or maybe the home of an impoverished heir eking by on SSI. You wouldn’t know, but you’d have to poke around.

There’s a ten speed leaning there. It reminds me of when I was walking by the wharf and there was this red Schwinn with a headlight and tire generator. It was leaning over on a pallet in the corner. It wanted it, but I wasn’t sure it was truly abandoned. I figured I’d come back the next day to see if it was still there.

Then I imagined some guy having to park the bike in exactly the same position each day before starting his wharf shift. So I clicked the generator down on the tire, like Goldilocks would. I figured the bike would be mine if it was still down the next day, but I never came back. It was all a little too OCD, and the bike wasn’t worth it. But that’s private property for you.

-Adam

Scott bitched me out on the phone this morning. He said I’ve got to blog about my painting, “Prairie Schooning, In Big Sky Country,” which I had told him is about materialism. I just woke up so I’m like, “Materialism? Huh?”

Scott’s like, “What? Do you just make this stuff up?”

I was like, “Uh, yeah, I made it up.”

And now, in the name of Farrington Smith Gallery, I must perpetuate this charade. Prairie Schooning, In Big Sky Country is all about materialism…IN PART!!! (Scott never lets me finish.)

Prairie Schooning, In Big Sky Country- land of neutrality. A place of possibility. It’s a planned trip: provisions have been stowed, resources have been stockpiled and are being towed behind in a Conestoga wagon. There’s no room for the guy; he’s displaced himself onto his horse.

Is his baggage a resource or a burden? Maybe he should cut and run, but I think he should stay the course.

-Adam