Week 4 of the Zero Sum auctions in the Blogger Show

Saturday's opening reception for The Blogger Show at the Digging Pitt Gallery here in Pittsburgh was a lot of fun. It was great meeting a few of you there!

The Zero Sum #33 auction, ending Thursday night, 12/13, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #34 auction, ending Friday night, 12/14, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #27 auction, ending Saturday night, 12/15, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #35 auction, ending Sunday night, 12/16, at 10 pm Eastern time.

Zero Sum auctions, ending, starting, it's a free for all.

For the duration of The Blogger Show, from now until mid-January, a new Zero Sum auction will start and end every day that the Digging Pitt Gallery is open. If it's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday night, at 10 pm Eastern time, and you're near your computer, tune in and see how it's going. Here are the first three:

Zero Sum #9 auction, ending tomorrow night, 11/17, at 10 pm Eastern time.

Zero Sum #14 auction, ending Sunday night, 11/18, at 10 pm Eastern time.

Zero Sum #15 auction, ending next Thursday, 11/22, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Blogger Show's Pittsburgh venues open their doors today, and ZSAP takes off!

Zero Sum #9

A couple of hours ago the doors opened for The Blogger Show's Pittsburgh venues, at Digging Pitt gallery, Digging Pitt Too, and the Panza Gallery. These three shows will be up until January 12. The opening receptions for the Digging Pitt and Digging Pitt Too shows will be on Saturday, December 8, from 6-9 pm, and the opening reception for the Panza Gallery will be on Saturday, December 15, from 6-9 pm.

And, I just gotta say that all of the Blogger Show artists owe a huge Thank You to Susan Constanse, who has done the lion's share of work installing the Pittsburgh shows, and has done a fantastic job. Thank You, Susan!


My contribution to the show will be a frenzied rotation of works from the Zero Sum Art Project. The first six pieces are up on the walls now. Each day that the gallery is open during the exhibition, a new auction will begin from the Zero Sum Art Project. These auctions will run for a week. So, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night from here until January 12, you will find a new piece from the Zero Sum Art Project being auctioned off on eBay. Every week I will take out the sold pieces from the exhibition, and replace them with the next artworks on the auction block. It will be a different show every week. Visitors to the gallery will see a small slice of the project, but they will see it in "the flesh". Online viewers will see the work through the pixellated haze of the computer monitor, but they will be able to see all of the work in the project in one place. So it's an odd blend of "virtual" and "real" worlds.

The first piece, that will start its auction at 10 pm tonight, will be Zero Sum #9. You can find the Zero Sum auctions, once they start tonight, here.

a must-see at the Digging Pitt Gallery

If you're in or near PIttsburgh, you should stop by the Digging Pitt Gallery this weekend, for the closing reception of Marci Gehring's show. The painting shown above (borrowed from Digging Pitt's website) is a floor to ceiling piece that is really quite wonderful. The artist manages to create images with very intensely worked surfaces that reward close inspection, while still working on a very large scale. Great stuff! The closing reception is June 2, from 6 - 9, and the gallery is open Thursday through Sunday if you can't make the reception.

And, should you be thinking a little further ahead, you might also want to jot down June 16 in your calendar book. That's the date for the opening reception of Inside Out Six: Selections from the Flat Files - Side II, also at Digging Pitt. This is a show curated from Digging Pitt's extensive flat files, and I'm delighted to say that I'll be one of the fourteen artists included in the exhibition.

Digging Pitt Gallery, Zero Sum #10, and an apology

If you're in Pittsburgh, you should put a visit to Digging Pitt Gallery on your list of things to do. Not only are the exhibitions consistently interesting, but the director John Morris maintains an extensive set of flat files, making the artwork of over 140 local, national, and international artists available to anyone who comes in the gallery. And as of recently, I'm one of those artists, so there you go.


If you want to see what's looming in the sky above this happy postal worker, you should visit the auction for Zero Sum #10 on eBay. It's a nice chunky collage of a painting.

One of the curious and amusing features about this blog for me is that the counter at the bottom allows you to see what brought people to the site - how they were referred. Ideally they would arrive here having done a search on google for, say, "nice chunky collage of a painting", and be happy to have found something related to their online quest. Sadly, it seems that for some reason a large proportion of FIMP's visitors arrive here looking for information on one of two topics - the Fiji Islands, or Mermaids. Quite a few are looking for instruction on how to draw mermaids. And despite the fact that this is the Fiji Island Mermaid Press, they find no relevant information whatsoever on their topics of interest.


Barnum's mermaid, as depicted in the New York Herald in 1842

One of these days, I need to discuss the origin of this grossly misleading title. For now, I'll just tell you that the Fiji Island Mermaid was one of P.T. Barnum's exhibits, a gaffe made up of the top half of a monkey sewn to the bottom half of a fish. I'm a big fan of Mr. Barnum, his display of this object, and his encouragement of the public to debate its "reality". It reminds me of a lot of things I find interesting about art.

So, my apologies to those web-surfers who have washed ashore on FIMP and been grossly disappointed. I'll have to work up a "how to draw a Fiji Island Mermaid" one of these days. . .