P.O. Box 9705 / West Vancouver, B. C. V7V 3N3 www nsartists. ca Serving Visual Artists from Fur",' Creek to Deep Cove since 1947 Next Meeting: jfjI QT WV V W Ttiesda3 September 18th, 2007, 7 - 9:30 PM Ste,hen's Church Hall, West, West Vancouver, BC I NORTH ShORE AR11STS GUILD I cPresident · h i· ` r ( [ £ arty A cItemicfiu 604-926-9640 `, lack fem@shaw.ca First, a sincere thank you to the many members who helped the Guild execute its plans, stage its events, and improve the organization this year. I would especially like to acknowledge the many contributions of your Board. In looking back, a few highlights come to mind: o Volunteers make the organization work relative to other volunteer based organizations these days, ours seems Our members are very helpful, we have had an ongoing focus on improving to be doing relatively well. processes to reduce workload, and that many of our new members become well engaged and can take over from longer term members who may need a break. A special thanks to Membership Director, Wanda Doyle for getting members matched to needs and to outgoing Vice President Edith Warner for her contributions to making the Guild work better every year. We need to keep working to share some of the work of the executive team even more. o Our financial picture continues to be healthy overall, despite some reductions in revenues in 2007 which were offset with expense management. Thanks to outgoing Treasurer Richard Summers, we now have detailed budgets that allow us to plan and react to changes in our finances much better during the year. o The visibility and regard for the Guild in the North Shore communities we serve has been steadily improving. We are called upon for advice and involvement. Thanks to Publicity Director Florence Allardice, we have furthered our exposure in the media, with the public and with municipal officials. This is complemented by 400+ e-mails we are now able to send out to people to invite them to our events. We had asked that our Past President Lorne Topham, add a focus on community matters and I look forward to continuing with this role next year. o We experimented and learned about how to make our exhibitions more successful and reach more people. However on a scale of I to 10 we may still have a way to go. More work to do and perhaps some new things to consider. o I always say that the best thing about our Guild is that we are very inclusive and we create an environment that is interested in having all members' progress as artists regardless of what stage they may be at. It is always great to hear of a member who has had their first painting shown in public, their first sale, their first juror's or People's Choice Award, all the way to having them give their first art workshop. The contributions of Jacquie Manning who arranges our monthly demonstrators, Barbara Ohi and Jeri Canderan who organized the very popular workshops and Al Spence, who staged our many showcase exhibitions all played a critical and appreciated role in making us all progress as artists. o With our recent Member Survey, we now have current perspectives from our membership and reviewed a number of topics from that Survey at the AGM. An organization like ours has groups of members that have understandably differing needs, wants and priorities. We seem to have a better appreciation of this valuable diversity among our members and are putting more of our energies into changes that help to accommodate differing needs. -- Last but definitely not least; this was the year of our 60th anniversary as an artist organization. Whatever we are today as an organization, and whatever progress we would state for the last year, has to be taken with the appropriate "grain of salt" in light of the tremendous contributions and changes effected by those who came before us. The History, written by Frieda Ashworth who deserves our utmost thanks, is now ready to be published, and is a fitting tribute to those many past and current members, My two year term as President has drawn to a close. Like any of the Board positions, it involved time, work and effort of course, but to me it was very worthwhile and enjoyable. We were able to make a few changes and improvements. The best part of this position is that you get to meet many dozens of our members, which is a great pleasure. I can speak for the whole Board in asserting that we really did try to make the best tradeoffs for the Guild and for its future and that hopefully time will bear this out. Have a good summer: see you in the fall. kidding!). Your homework is a 2 page essay on "What I painted this summer!!" (Just