Dear Friends;
The ad above represents my last act as founding member of the Ashland Painters Union. Hopefully it will appear in the Ashland Gallery Guide for 2014, but since I am resigning from all participation in APU I can not say for sure whether it will be used. I gratefully appreciate the estate of Philippe Halsman for letting me use this amazing photo of Nabokov, Vladimir did indeed spend time in Ashland where he may have (or not) finished writing Lolita. I think he would have gotten a laugh from this ad, but since he is long deceased I suppose it hardly matters. Suffice it to say that it is a piece of graphic art that I am proud to have created.
As for the gallery I especially want to thank all my dear friends who contributed to the gallery monetarily and artistically in it’s initial conception. I had high hopes for it’s success and I appreciate your help in getting things off the ground, even though few of you were in close enough proximity to see it in person. As you may have figured I am leaving the gallery and this is the last post that will appear on this website. Maybe someone else will port this site over to their server and continue to update it as the gallery evolves without me, but I plan to keep this site up on my server as a record of its first year: A time capsule of what was.
I will try not to bore you with the details of the last year. Suffice it to say that having a gallery in Ashland has been akin to having a gallery on the planet Mars. We have recieved almost no coverage from the press, have sold very few pieces of art, and have been seen by a fairly small number of people. This might have something to do with the fact that we have not actually been open much of the time, but when we were, few people ventured in. I have often thought of this endeavor as a Dada experiment and in the final analysis these shortcomings have hardly mattered to me. I was finally able to hang a good deal of my art in a space outside of my studio, which is perhaps every artist’s dream.
I have to say I care very little about what happens to the gallery at this point. Although its initial creation bears all the marks of my creative psyche (name, logo, design), it’s direction slipped elusively from my grasp before we were barely born. I tried for quite some time to effect its evolution, but my suggestions were rarely heeded. That I have been labelled divisive, rude and uncooperative should come as no surprise to those that know me well. I am sure others view this differently, but I of course am right. Such are the joys of being an elitist; I make no apologies for my behavior.
Thus ends an interesting chapter of experience. I leave this as my final testament on the subject. Take it as you will.
Nikolai Klein
Founding Member of The Ashland Painters Union