Into the Woods (Part 2)

During the week after my father’s death, while my brother, sister and I worked out all of the arrangements for my fathers funeral, Ashley and her friend, Nancy, painted as much as they could to help out with the exhibit work. When I came back to the museum, I found much of the foreground shrubs, trees and flowers were brilliantly done. But the autumn trees they painted didn’t look anything like the rest of the exhibit and some other details were not what I expected. Sadly, I had to repaint several parts of the exhibit to match the work that I had done so far, the director was not happy at the delay. At the end of March she had to submit a report and photographs of the finished exhibit to the main granting agency. It wasn’t going to happen, we were barely halfway there. We brought in some trees and made up a beaver pond out of bits and pieces and angled the photos populated with a number of Treehouse families and made do with it. The finished product would be much grander. April and May passed slowly with the daily slog of painting trees, branches and leaves, lots of leaves. An exhibit company began to cover frames made for the beaver pond and bear cave. A flat painted momma bear for the cave was not going to be impressive enough and so another exhibit fabricator was found to make a 3-D mother bear and cub. As I finished up the main walls, more panels surrounding the entrances were build and brought in. Massive walls that needed to be filled with trees and more leaves. Tired of waiting, the museum director set a finish date for the exhibit and then spent many days of her busy schedule painting foreground flowers, shrubs and bushes. It came down to spending every single day but two in July, painting. The beaver pond and the long stream was painted, animal and tree details were finished and several more birds were added to fill in blank spots. The cave and pond were finished and installed and the long finished animals fastened to the walls. A hundred and one details were also painted, all the bits and pieces that make up a whole had to be added. The exhibit would open during the museum’s annual special day, Get Ready for Kindergarten with Miss Bindergarten, (another excellent book series by Ashley). Arriving in the nick of time, Ashley helped the final day painting some details with me before the dedication, mere hours away. The exhibit was overwhelmed by curious museum goers anxious to see what had been hidden by the walls all those months. The general acclaim for the beauty of the space was pleasant to hear, but as one mother and child were leaving, she asked, “what happened to the music room?” (The former exhibit that we replaced). Sadly, I was too surprised and did not have a good answer for that. (Below, some of the finish work of the exhibit.)

[image error]