Speaking of speaking…
Last Friday, I gave a talk about Apple Pie at DIVA. The Eugene venue comes equipped with a screen and projector, which is unusual for a gallery space and a real asset. It meant that I not only had my paintings to back me up, but my process shots and reference images too.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and, for a gallery talk, a projector is a secret weapon!
I showed my research along with my false starts in my slides and then pointed to the completed works—in this case, I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong—to show where my process had taken me.
I didn’t want to speak for more than an hour. That’s my #1 rule of doing a lecture: I never talk for more than sixty minutes total, including the time for taking questions. I would rather leave the audience wanting more than keep them in a state of fidgety boredom while I go on and on about myself! If anyone has questions for me after that time, I answer them one-on-one instead of keeping the whole group there.
I also like to meet my audience ahead of time. I get to know the people who show up a few minutes early and ask them what they’re interested in hearing about. A talk will be that much more engaging if I’m addressing real people instead of a mass of anonymous faces.
It’s also for that reason that I take questions throughout my presentation. I always feel that, when a speaker asks people to save questions for the end, she-he is telling them that they are not valued, that she-he is trying to do something and that the audience is only interrupting it. To my mind, a talk should be a conversation, albeit one in which the speaker maintains a certain amount of authority—after all, who wants to listen to someone they don’t respect?
For this particular talk at DIVA, I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak about all of the works in Apple Pie, so I asked the audience to direct my talk—it was a choose-your-own-adventure kind of lecture! I spoke about whichever pieces they were most interested in, showing only the slides pertaining to those works.
Apple Pie is open through 27 June, Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 5.
Downtown Initiative For The Visual Arts
110 W Broadway
Eugene, OR 97401
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CATEGORIES: - Business of art - Events - Apple Pie -
