A client-turned-friend and I decided to grab some girl time this week. If you, too, are moms with small children, you understand what a cause for celebration this is. Gallery-hopping is the activity we settled on, hoping for a bit more intellectual stimulation than the average Barbie Mariposa-Diego/Dora-Scooby Doo onslaught we might otherwise contend with during the day.

But Kathryn’s sitter was coming at 10 am (my own kiddo goes to daycare MWF) and most galleries open at 11…except for Russell Collection, on W. 6th Street, which I’d never been to. “Never been to” was part of my own personal criteria for this outing…we were looking for a bit of adventure. And according to the Interwebs, they were featuring works by Dali and Kandinsky.

Salvador Dali and Kandinsky Kandinsky? At an art gallery in Austin? We were intrigued.

When we arrived at the gallery, we had the place to ourselves. Evidently, Austinites are not clamoring for fine art at 10:30 on a Friday morning. This turned out to be very fortuitous, because not only did we get the grand tour from Jacqueline Martinez, the art consultant on deck, but it also allowed us to bombard her with all sorts of questions about the art we might have been too self-conscious to ask, had there been other patrons in the place.

It was so thrilling, this experience. It seemed so indulgent to see these prints and tapestries to begin with. (Dali did Aubusson tapestries? Who knew?) Then to get all the inside scoop from Jacqueline about the inspiration for each of the series featured, plus a lot of anecdotal information about Dali himself that I never learned in all the semesters of art history I took in college…it really helped us connect with the art on a more personal level.

After spending quite a bit of time with Jacqueline and Salvador (I felt we were on a first-name-basis after talking with Jacqueline), I noticed a small sign informing me that the gallery offered twelve-months-no-interest-financing. My eyes went from the small sign to my favorite of the Dali prints on display just a few steps away. Small sign, $7205 Dali print. Small sign, $7205 Dali print. I kept looking back and forth, the gears switching to overdrive in my mind. Impulsively, I whipped out my BlackBerry and started crunching the numbers. Could I really afford to possess my very own Dali? Could my new Dali print peacefully coexist with the cartoon-y etchings I did in printmaking in college? Was it right to put Dali in a duplex?

I know I will someday kick myself over it, but Salvador and I parted at the door. Jeb and I are trying to save for a house right now and I couldn’t come up with a rationalization that would allow me to divert funds toward an impulse buy on that level.

Still, it was fun to feel like a superrich art collector for half a second.

Russell Collection is located at 1137 West 6th Street. If you are normally intimidated by art galleries, find out when Jacqueline is working. She was awesome and immediately put us at ease.