Forth Valley Open Studios – brochure with the printers and pdf now online- www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com
This year we are going to concentrate more on social media for coverage. Local newspapers are very much hit and miss affairs. Last year we found that those studios that tweeted and facebooked their event got the biggest number of visitors.
The Changing Room gallery in Stirling organised the first of a series of three perfromance video workshops. I guess if the eight of us who turned up knew in advance what we would be asked to do then some of us might have backed up. But it was challenging. They warned us they wanted to make us feel a bit uncomfortable and they sure did.
We had an exercise akin toi speed dating- two minutes around the group gleaning as much information as we could then we each hd to sit in front of a video camera and perform the character we had created.
We get to see the result next Tuesday.
Just heard today that Glasgow Art Fair has been cancelled. It is being replaced by something called Vault in the autumn which it is claimed will reflect more accurately contemporary art being produced in the city compared to the traditional work offered by galleries showing in the annual Art Fair held in Glasgow Square.
While this will be a blow to painters it does have the potential to showcase more exciting work being produced in the city.
Meanwhile our brochure for this years Forth Valley Open Studios has finally been signed off by the web designer and its gone to press.
Despite all our plans to be well ahead we have found ourselves slipping back and we now only have six weeks to the event which starts on June 11.
We have over 100 artists and 71 venues participating so we are confident that once again it will be a success.
This is an artist led initiative with no public funding. We rely totally on income from artists who pay £75 to go in the brochure.
This is backed up with a limited amount of revenue from advertising . None of us on the committee like the idea of selling adverts so it is a miracle we have any at all.
I am interested in how we communicate in the digital age when everything is free and instant.
So, during a recent visit to the Caribbean I kept a travel blog and discovered a whole new sub-culture- on the internet: an amazing collection of multi-media travel blogs on
http://www.travelblog.org/
Check out my travel blog on:
http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Titchtwitter/
What struck me about these blogs was not only their authenticity but the freshness the writers, mostly young people on gap years, brought to the subject.
In my former life as a journalist, before I went to Glasgow School of Art, I had occasionally been offered what was known in the trade as “freebies” invitations to travel abroad. These were all carefully orchestrated so that you only saw the best of the country. Our travel reports were inevitably sanitised. There was an unspoken understanding between newspapers and travel companies that if you wrote anything that was highly critical you wouldn’t be asked again.
Of course the visits were so carefully managed by PR people you rarely got to see anything they didn’t want you to anyway. ( We are talking about travel writing not political journalism).
