Do People Buy Art They See Hanging in Restaurants? I Hope So.

In October, just after the tour of homes, I received an email from Jason at Stone Soup Kitchen asking if I’d be interested in hanging a few paintings in the restaurant. Now, SSK is one of my favorite Grant Park restaurants—and one of our best kept secrets—great for weekend brunch (you can actually get a table without the 45-60 minutes wait) or weekday lunch. They always have interesting art from local artists hanging in the restaurant, so I’m happy for the opportunity for some exposure. Guess putting my card on their bulletin board back in the spring paid off.

Early in December I hung six pieces from a series I did on fall trees, which will hang in the restaurant until the end of January.

Colors of Change, Winter's Solace & Barren

Signs of Change & Fall Trees

They also invited me to be part of their Holiday Art Sale & Party, which was held at the restaurant on December 16th. This was my first event of this type, and I was curious to see if it would be worth the time. I sent out an email blast to my local mailing list and a few people made it by. It was a great chance to meet other local artists—from whom I learned about ICE Pop Up Shop—and make connections.

I enjoyed talking to friends and potential buyers, and sold two paper cuts—A Day in the Country (my personal favorite of the paper cuts) and The Guardian.

A Day in the Country

The Guardian

The night before the show/sale, a colleague of Mr. Man’s and her husband came by the house to buy a piece for each of their parents—Mockingbird in Dogwood and a tree painting I had just recently finished.

Mockingbird in Dogwood

Not a bad December.  Now if I can just do that every month.

Preparing for the Grant Park Tour of Homes

When first asked to be on the tour of homes, you feel honored; you love your house, and while it’s not a “show place” as some homes on the tour tend to be, it’s comfortable, eclectic, and beautifully lived in. And, you think, what a good reason to get a couple of projects done around the house. Great, we're in!

Then reality sinks in; strangers will be traipsing through your home, looking at it with fresh eyes. You start to look at your house a little more critically and soon realize there is a lot that goes unnoticed during the day-to-day routine of life. Where did that crack come from? When was the last time the baseboards were cleaned? How many years (yes, I said years) has that bookcase gone unstained? Before you know it, what started out as a simple “freshening up” turns into patching, repairing, painting, sewing, and spending, spending, spending.

When your husband tells you he has to go to South Africa for a week, you file it in the back of your head and think about how you’ll be able to work into the night without having to stop to make dinner (not that you’ve made dinner lately, being too tired from working on projects all day). Or perhaps you’ll go ahead and push yourself past the point of reason and paint the dining room and study while he’s out of town. Realizing you have only four weekends before the tour, you sit down with the calendar to plan out what still needs to be done—since someone has to work, Mr. Man is only available to help on the weekends, so you save certain “manly” projects for him (like pouring concrete foundations for the rain barrel stands)—when it hits you that his trip to South Africa begins on a weekend!

So, you find yourself sweating in the 90+ degrees of a humid August Saturday afternoon, planting, raking, and mulching the garden when your glasses break. Not the a-screw-fell-out, easily fixed kind of broken, but the I-need-new-frames kind of broken. Every time you bend over they fall off, missing one arm as they are. Normally, you’d be thrilled to get a new, funky pair of glasses, but who has the time; not to mention the money considering you’ve bought enough chalk, spackle, sandpaper, paint and paint brushes to single-handedly raise the price of Home Depot stock.

Sometimes things are not as easy as they sound.

The Trashing of Grant Park

Is it just me, or has everyone else noticed the large amount of trash in the park lately? Why is this? Maybe it’s due, in part, to the lack of trash cans? I’ve noticed the new dog stations along Cherokee and at the unofficial “dog area” (Kudos to whichever organization provided these—now, if we can just get people to use them!) and the new red “hot coals only” cans, but where are the trash cans? Other than a few near the pavillions and along the paths, there seems to be way too few cans for a 131 acre park.

Grant Park is a public park owned by the City of Atlanta, second in size only to Piedmont Park, yet Grant Park doesn’t seem to get the services Piedmont Park does. Is it too much to ask that the city provide an adequate number of trash cans? The City of Atlanta’s Office of Parks’ Mission statement is...

“To improve, preserve, protect and maintain the City’s parks and public green spaces as a safe and enjoyable enhancement to the quality of life for all residents and visitors to the City of Atlanta.”

I guess in Atlanta all parks are not created equal. So, how can we get trash cans in the park? Maybe the Grant Park Conservancy can hold a fund raiser—I, for one, would make a donation—or maybe we can beg the help of the Arthur Blank Family Foundation, which has a generous history of contributing to Atlanta’s green spaces. In the meantime, how about we all take pride in our park and put to good use the manners our mothers taught us and clean up after ourselves—including cleaning up after your dog.

Tin Lizzy's Grant Park

Mr. Man and I had dinner at Tin Lizzy’s this past Friday night. We’ve been watching for a couple of months for this new restaurant to open up in the space previously occupied by Six Feet Under. They had a good crowd, and from the looks of things, largely Park residents and locals. Everyone from the host/hostess, to the waiter, to the manager were eager to make sure all were having a good time and enjoying their meal. We started out with margaritas (the house for Mr. Man and the Texas for me). They are served in short glasses and were seriously strong. Maybe we’re just lightweights, but we had to ask for another glass of mixer to be able to drink them. Once we balanced out the Tequila, they were excellent!

We had high hopes for this restaurant as we welcome any new establishment in the GP area. We were offered a free order of chips and salsa as this was our first visit—maybe it’s just me, but I think all Mexican restaurants should give you free chips and salsa—and we ordered some queso to go along with it. The queso was bland and needs spicing up; nothing a few jalapeños wouldn’t cure. The salsa verde got mixed reviews; Mr. Man liked it, but I found it a little too vinegary. The chips were great; light and fresh.

For dinner Mr. Man had the black bean soup and half salad with carne asada. The black bean soup is pureed (a turn off for both of us) and lacked flavor. We tend to like our black bean soup with beans and spice. Mr. Man ordered a bowl but was served a cup, and when our waiter tried to correct it, Mr. Man chose to just keep the cup and then wound up not eating it. He did enjoy his salad though.

I had the Santa Fe Steak Taco, which was delicious, and a side of the veggie rice, again no flavor! I also ordered salsa fresa as I didn’t like the salsa verde. A major disappointment. It basically tasted like tomato juice with a few diced tomatoes thrown in. Where was the cilantro, onions & jalapeños? As the restaurant has only been open a little over a week, you expect them to need a little time to get things right.