All set up and ready for action (Patreon)

I left the most torturous part of the framing process for this morning: wiring. You put wire on a picture frame or stretched canvas because it's the best way to hang a piece of art on the wall. It's easier to hang and easier to center. To put wire on a picture, you screw in two D-rings, feed framing wire through the D rings and tie the two ends into what's called a "framer's knot". 

It sucks. It hurts the muscles in my fingers, the bones in my wrists, the wire pokes into the skin on the tips of my fingers. I tend to hunch over and tense up when I do it. It hurts my brain. I get sweaty for some reason.  

I listened to Climate of Hunter by Scott Walker. I mention that because it was the only good thing going on during this painful process. 

I drilled a screw through the front of a frame for the first time in my life. I did not throw the ruined frame at the wall as hard as I could. And yes, I'm bragging about that. 

I ended up not putting wires on the smaller un-framed pieces. They'll hang on screws with some mounting putty on the bottom corners to keep them straight. And yes, I'm justifying my laziness.

I put the paintings into a box separated by pieces of cardboard so they wouldn't get scratched on the journey ahead. 

The Hive is in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles. I'm a pretty good driver (more bragging) but heavy city traffic gives me anxiety. There's something coming my way that I don't see. I'm not paying attention to something and it's going to suddenly jump out in front of me. 

I parked in front of a fire hydrant in front of the gallery and unloaded all these pieces, my tool box and the new shelf I got at Walmart into the gallery.

I paid 10 dollars for parking.

My Metallica shirt got caught on a piece of metal in the urine scented alley behind the parking structure, tearing a hole right over my belly button. There was a person sleeping on a red velvet couch next to a dumpster and a puddle and some broken bottles.

You have to watch the ground when you walk in LA. Poop.

A man with a guitar, a bandana over his face and a dirty baseball hat with a few dollar bills in it aggressively limped up to me started yelling a bunch of things that I couldn't understand. "I'm not joking" was the only thing I could make out. I just said "I don't have anything." and kept walking towards the gallery a block away.

Nathan, Vicky and Brenda were getting the walls and labels ready for the show this Saturday. Artists came in and dropped off their art. 

I got to my wall and I took everything down. A blank slate. 

I spend the next 3 hours hanging and adjusting the paintings, straightening them, hanging the labels with double sided tape and installing the new shelf I bought for my prints.

While trying to hang the shelf I mangled the indents where the shelf is supposed to sits on the hardware on the wall. It was barely hanging on. It looked like if a fly landed on it it would tear away from the wall.

I thought "what would Francis Ford Coppola do?" He'd make it work. So I went and got the longest screw I could find and started drilling it straight through the  back of the shelf and into the wall. 

The drill died halfway through. So now I had this shelf tipping diagonally away from the wall with a random screw sticking out of it.

I heard people coming so I quickly pulled the shelf off the wall and hid it. "hey do you know where the other battery for the drill is?" 

After looking everywhere we found the extra battery and I got the screws through the shelf and put my prints on it. 

I packed up the old art, my tools, my screws, threw away the trash, made notes of which prints I need to replenish, and tipped my hat to the wall.