Bill Knudstrup, a painter and one of five remaining partners of the Dancing Dog Gallery, talked regretfully about its closing. Just a year and a half ago it seemed a suitably art-focused repurposing of the old Herb David Guitar Studio, but Knudstrup says it just didn’t generate enough income to pay the high cost of doing business downtown. The three partners who have dropped out did so not because of any internal turmoil, but due to separate life events, and Knudstrup says “each time someone left, it was more work for the remaining partners and was harder to come up with the rent.”
Knudstrup says he’s looking forward to having more time for his own work: “I’ll probably start looking for some gallery representation myself. The work I’ve done has been good, and it was good knowing it would be out in public, but I haven’t had the amount of time in the studio I used to have. I usually do thirty to fifty paintings a year, and this past year was half that.”
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Vellum opened two years ago with big-city sophistication, small-city prices, and a lot of drama backstage. A former employee recalls rushing a sous vide machine–a super-slow cooker that’s a favorite of molecular gastronomes, but lacked a required variance–from room to room ahead of restaurant inspectors (it was finally caught and evicted). In its short life, Vellum retooled its menu, lost key staff, lost its star chef Peter Roumanis (son of owner John Roumanis), retooled the menu again, added a humbler “Grill” to its name, and finally closed in January.
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