It’s a beautiful Spring day here in Iowa City! Just this past Saturday, we had our Spring Mini Session’s final show, “The Artist Is In.” It was such a blast! And we were two members down––I can’t imagine how awesome it would’ve been if we’d all been able to be there. No guilt! No guilt! Leigha and Tracy had very good reasons they couldn’t make it. But of course we still wish they could’ve joined us.

Presenting members were Candace Weigand, Hope Spragg, Emily Jalinsky, and myself (Carla Baudrons). You can still watch the show––in fact, I think it’s possible for me to imbed (embed?) the video here, so let me just try to do that real quick…

Did it work? It’s telling me that content from Facebook can’t be previewed. Huh! Well, I guess I’ll just have to publish it and hope for the best. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, it was great fun. Candace gave us trade secrets (not really) of working with oil paints on extra-large canvases, Hope showed us the insane amount of work she was able to do over the past two months, Emily talked about the new and different ways she’s engaging her art practice recently, and I shared the bits of artwork I squeezed in between chemo infusions.

It was such a great session. It was only two months, but it felt like much longer than that, probably because this group has been doing Art Office together almost from the beginning! As we were winding down the session, Leigha made the comment, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without Art Office,” and––as the boss––my heart was warmed, but as a staff member, I was like, “Yeah! Me too!” Ha!

So let me fill you in on some details then, about why we’re not having another session until the Fall. If you missed it somehow, I had cancer last year, and was undergoing chemotherapy during this past session. I’m done with it now (and cancer free, woohoo!), so my next (and hopefully last) procedure is reconstruction surgery at the end of June. It’s a pretty intense surgery, and I’m supposed to be out of commission for at least six weeks afterward, which puts us at the beginning of August. At this point, my plan is to hold a month-long fundraiser for Art Office, and then the next session will begin. The Fall session will run from September 12th to December 4th, assuming my recovery goes well.

And there you have it! I hope that wasn’t TMI. Being a one-woman operation, I sometimes have a hard time separating my personal life from Art Office. It’s my baby! And it’s going to be hard to have such a large gap between sessions! To be honest, I’m considering having a six-week session, starting very soon, just to keep myself and others afloat for a little while longer. But I’ll make another post about that, when/if I decided to do it. If you have strong feelings about it, please let me know.

Well, the last and primary thing I want to tell you about is our Spring Mini Session’s virtual exhibit. It’s live now, right here on our website, under the “Shows” tab. But you can also follow this link. There you can see all of the artwork we talked about during the show. If you have any questions about the work, or you want to buy a piece or print, there are links at the bottom of each segment for how to contact the artists directly.

Oh and just a P.S.––Tracy doesn’t have any work up in the virtual gallery because she is a fancy-schmancy writer, and that’s mainly what she worked on during this session. She was going to share some of it during the show, but something urgent came up. Anyway, if you want to read some of her wonderful writing, she is a contributor at BookRiot, and uses her Instagram as a platform too. All of that information is on the show page, so you should definitely check that out.

And that’s all I’ve got this time. Thanks for reading, guys! I’ll catch ya next time.