The books have arrived

What a week, first the books arrived at Weyba Downs and now occupy a portion of Alan's working space. He shifted several storage boxes and paintings in order to accommodate them but at the rate that the books have been flying out  of the door (thanks to Isla) their occupation of his studio space will diminish rapidly.
And here, in Auckland I was driving along the traffic-clogged M1 into Auckland when my cellphone rang. It was the Import company saying that the truck transporting the books was at our storage space but was returning to base because there was no fork lift to unload the books. (Unlike the Qld carrier who manfully offloaded 1000 books, 2 boxes at a time - 30kg a pop). Kathie, the ever-helpful manager at National Mini Storage solved the problem and then found Hercules to haul them all upstairs and into their cages for me.
Denys Trussell pronounced the book beautiful; Paul Greenberg, our distributor, says Thames & Hudson would be proud of it; and Linda Spicer, patted it affectionately.
Books have been sent out for review and the invitations to the first book launch at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 4th November at 5.30pm have been posted. phew...
more later ...

Alan Pearson: Expressionist Portraits

It's late Sunday afternoon, the weather is a lot warmer than it was this morning where working in the studio to get everything ready for the trip across the Tasman was a bit of a mission. I'm almost ready, the bag is yet to be packed, papers to be gathered together, a book to finish and library books returned ... you know the story, but here is the front cover of the book which will be delivered to us this week...

The journey begins...

It's just a few days now before I fly over to Auckland to meet the books as they arrive by sea, woohoo! It's the end of one part of the journey and the beginning of another. Over two years there's been much joy and also gnashing of teeth during the process of writing, photographing and assembling all the information needed to produce this 391 page book. Alan's cover looks great (see above and  http://www.alexandrastewart.co.nz ) he worked so hard on the design!
I want to thank Ann Gordon for suggesting this to me. Thanks to Isla also for her encouragement to get going... more later... love Al & Al