The Princess of Art

So there I was last Friday, the last day of March and the day before April Fool’s Day. For the second time in less than a month, I was at a gallery opening. This Time I didn’t have to read and there was free booze – it just keeps getting better.

The gallery was no less than cool, but then that would be expected given the gallery is owned and run by Ingrid Mueller who once reviewed my novel Team Player with the headline: Local Author Shows Enormous Talent.

Her gallery is something to be drooled over by art lovers and anybody with a taste for something that might give their lives even a moment of meaningful reflection. It was one of the most eclectic collections of work I’ve ever seen, but it all fit together with the precision of a successful birth. Or something like that.

It was great. And it had a great line-up of artists: Phillip Iverson, Marie Helene-Alain, Don Andrus, Wayne Boucher, Hugh Kearney, Janet Miller, Silas Robinson, Brian Burke, Gordon Dunphy, Bill Rose, David Umholtz, Darren Emenau, Alexandria Flood, J. Wright-Cheney, Susanne Hill and Susan Wood. Nobody else was good enough for this exhibit. So there.

Just kidding. In fact, there were some pretty accomplished artists in the opening preview crowd. In further fact, the crowd was a big one full of star-studded local celebrities. See if you can pick them out. If you’re not from Fredericton, you may have to move here for a few years to identify a few of them. But the other are, indeed, those people who haunt your dreams. This is where you can meet them.

BTW, the name of the gallery is Art Concepts and it’s on the York Street squeezed in tightly between King and Queen. You might call Ingrid Fredericton’s Princess of Art.

This is Karen (a weaver extraordiaire who lives along the banks of the epic Saint John River with her musician husband Eric. The woman beside her is not Margaret Atwood.

Guess which one is a famous publisher – the beautiful woman or the so-so hairline? I might publish the answer in the next edition of my newsletter. Maybe. The back of the head in the distance does not belong to Jerzy Kosinski. Jerzy’s dead now. Let go.

Which famous poet and publisher is this? See the newsletter. The man with the glasses looking up is not Kurt Vonnegut.

Notice how, when I walk into the room with my camera, everybody looks away and pretends that I’m not there. The woman in the left foreground is not Ayn Rand. The woman in front of her has a black belt in Karate.

And then, right after I introduce myself … (BTW, the woman to the right in the background is not Tess Gerritson.)

Guess which one is Ingrid. She's not talking to Kilgore Trout.