Bill Black is Director of Liquid 6 Image Design Ltd, the company that created and maintains this website. He opened his own house for 5 years as part of the Beyond the Level trail exhibiting between 8 and 23 artists each year. He has also exhibited in houses in the Hanover trail and Independent venues as well as local galleries.
To download this document for printing, click here

This week, I promised you the nitty-gritty of what you do with your home, your furniture and your children for those four weekends in May and how to deal with difficult artists. We’ll start with the last point - yes, some artists can be difficult.

Now, I should point out that the vast majority are not. In my house we exhibited a mix of professional and non-professionals over the five years we were open and I had very few problems with the 100+ artists who exhibited there. However, when I did have problems they inevitably revolved around the fact that some artists seemed to forget that they had been invited into a home. My home. They treated my house as if it were a public space, rather than a private space that the public were invited into. With three small children in the house, this lack of consideration sometimes grated and was inevitably a point of friction. You want an example?

An artist’s friend came into the house to see her. He used our toilet, in an area of the house clearly marked Private, without asking us, going upstairs onto the floor where our children were tucked safely out of the way. We have no objection to people using our toilet but I don’t like going upstairs in my own home to find a stranger wandering about in an area clearly designated as Private.
continue