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A Spot on the Wall (24 July 2010)
An exciting, new art exhibition opens today at Richmond's old railway station enabling over 200 artists to exhibit and sell their work.
The exhibition, which is called, A Spot on the Wall, has been organised by the charity that looks after The Station, Richmond’s restored and converted Victorian railway terminus building. It features the work of 210 artists and photographers from throughout Yorkshire, the North East and even further afield.
The Curator of the event, Donald Cline, explains the concept: “Since The Station reopened to the public in 2007, it has become one of the most popular and successful spaces for artists to show and sell their work. Sadly, during the year there are far more artists who would like to use the space than we can possibly accommodate. This summer we decided that to address this problem, by allowing 200 artists to hire a space in the building on a first come, first served basis.”
Each participating artist has literally been allocated a Spot on the Wall, in which to display and sell their work. In their spots they can show just one piece of their art at any given time. If it sells, they can replace it straightaway with a new piece of work and so it goes until the exhibition ends on September 3rd. The artists are also free to change and refresh their spots, as and when they want to during the course of the show.
“This is exciting”, says Cline, “in that the works of art a visitor sees on a Monday will almost certainly be different when they come again, even on the following day.”
With the majority of exhibitions staged at The Station and elsewhere, the work on display is static. What you see is what you get for the entire duration of the show.
Charity Trustee, Lou Holliday, who has overall responsibility for exhibitions in The Station said… “From the moment we told artists about our plans for A Spot on the Wall, we were inundated with applications to participate and within just a few weeks, the 200+ spots that we had to fill were gone.”
You would have thought that many artists might consider such an exhibition a bit too competitive and restrictive but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Frances Connolly is an artist from Croft near Darlington. “I decided to take a spot at The Station this summer because in the past my work as sold really well from here. I also think that because people will be able to see the work of so many different artists all at once, they’ll be encouraged to visit the exhibition to shop for art. Hopefully that will be good for all the artists who are exhibiting.”
A Spot on the Wall opens on Saturday, 24th July. Admission is free and the exhibition can be viewed daily from 9 am – 9 pm. All work is available to purchase and take away immediately.
Picture: One of the paintings in the show (by Chuck Lindley)
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