#Invitation vernissage expo free

Here in Brighton there are regularly over 200 open houses every May during the annual Arts Festival. Nowadays there are artist’s open house exhibitions all over the country. In the years since the Open House concept has taken off in a big way. We think this was the first such ‘artists open house’ venture in the UK. We were actually the seventh artist’s open house in the group. He suggested that we should get together with a group of six other artists who opened their houses to show art during the annual Brighton Arts Festival every May. That is how he heard about us, and so he popped in. Gavin had been dropping of one of his kids to the music teacher who lived opposite. He was Gavin Henderson the director of the Brighton Arts Festival. One year an extra, uninvited, visitor came along just by chance. We hoped to cover the really bad-income, cold and gloomy, month of January that was bound to follow. We had found that it was an effective and inexpensive way to end the year on a selling spree.

#Invitation vernissage expo free

We even invested in free wine and cheese. After we had been to Sweden, and were back in the UK, we used the term ‘vernissage’ to cover the invitation-only private-views that we regularly held in our own front room at home.įor several years, back in the 1980’s, usually over a weekend just before Christmas, we invited collectors of our artwork to come to our house where we had set up a private exhibition. So basically vernissage is an exhibition preview event. In Sweden it is rather similar to what we know as a ‘ exhibition private view’. The original term comes from the day before an exhibition opens when the paintings would get a final coat of varnish. Vernissage is French and means ‘varnishing’. We came across the concept of a Vernissage when we were invited to exhibit at an art gallery in Sweden.