The Final Day of the Red Dragonfly Gallery is at Hand!

Let the record show that it is the 23rd of June 2019.

The day is finally at hand. Today marks the last business day for the Red Dragonfly gallery!

It is definitely a day of mixed feelings. Last night after I closed for the day, we had a small gathering in the merchant area of the small arcade where the gallery is located. There, the other people with stores there were giving us a bit of a send-off.

Meanwhile, in less than two hours I will open the doors for the last time, and at 5:00pm I will close them for the last time.

Mood shot from last night, with the bright overhead lights turned off....

Still Work to be Done!

Although I will be here next week, it will only be to pack up things and ship art back to artists who don't live locally, and also to be open for the artists from our local area who are coming in to pick up their work.

If all goes according to plan, on Thursday I will be cleaning the — by then empty — space, and then handing back the keys to Ed the building manager and then it will all be done.

I took the above picture last night after turning down the lights and I think it might become the last photograph of the Red Dragonfly as an ongoing business. It is already looking a bit "thin," but it still has it's cool and quirky atmosphere.

Although there is a lot of activity and confusion happening at the moment, I know I will have more time to reflect on the entire experience once we are finally closed, and the keys handed back. At the moment, I am too busy for that.

Maybe that's a good thing.

"Love/Regret," a metal sculpture we had some time back...

There's a part of me that feels very relieved to have this be over.

After all the gallery was not really doing very well (financially speaking), and we're walking away with quite a lot of debt to show for our efforts. And even though we were helping some local artists get much needed exposure for their work, the bottom line is that it was very expensive for us to keep our doors open.

We had to face the reality that we simply could not afford to have a business that cost us money every month. Since we have no wealthy benefactors who are helping us out — and we're not independently wealthy — we really couldn't justify staying open. It doesn't really matter how much we liked the place, if it costs us out-of-pocket to have it, then it's the wrong thing to be doing.

Maybe that sounds a little mercenary, considering we are dealing with the world of art... which after all is supposed to be done "for its own sake," but the fact remains that electric companies require money and landlords require money and cable companies require money and unless that is coming in from somewhere, the equation just doesn't work.

The "Otter Family" is one of the public art pieces in our town...

Staying Present, One Last Time

For the moment I'm going to try to just focus on today.

As I said, in a couple of hours I will go into our little gallery and open it up and do my very best, one last time. And maybe, just maybe, some soul we'll come in, look around and say "Hey you did a really good job!"

And perhaps it is time for me to look at that and consign myself to the reality that that's a reward in its own right.

Meanwhile, I hope everybody is having a great day!

Of course the Red Dragonfly blog on Steemit will continue on; it'll just take a slightly different format.

I will continue to write about art and the business of being an artist, and perhaps some of our own creative endeavors — I will just do so without the additional perspective of having the daily interaction with the art world through an actual brick-and-mortar gallery space.

Thanks again to everybody who has followed our journey here, and I hope you will stay with us as we continue on a new journey with a slightly different focus!

Thanks for reading!

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