Saturday, June 12 

It rained off and on all day; Light showers mixed with heavy downpours with a patch or two of dry. BUT I enjoyed it more than I would have expected. It got chilly, but amazingly, the weather did not diminish the attendance by as much as I would have expected. LOTS of traffic to our tent. I changed my modus operandi this year, putting my best work on the walls and better work in the bins, which raised some prices overall. Probably not the wisest thing to do in this economy, but I could not afford to give my work away. I don't produce just for the market like some of the artists do. I did not sell very much, in fact, nothing bigger than a 6x9,  but the positive response, and amount of people who stopped to look was worth it. PLUS, I got the best thing an artist in this area could hope for, and that is a master artist came in, said my alley painting was the first painting to draw him into a booth; that he always wanted to paint alleys, but just never has, and what a great painting my alley was; then he looked at Smokin" and said, wonderful expression with little detail; then he asked what gallery I showed in. And I had to say I was not in a gallery. Anyway, that was worth all the rain.
More rain is forecast for all day today, with thunderstorms thrown in for good measure. I am adding a layer or two, taking towels for the condensation that comes into the tent and hangs over the art work. I did hear a few tents went down on Friday night, but I did not hang until yesterday morning. I took all my hanging work down and brought it home last night as well. My bin work is in covered plastic bins, so they should be good. Drew, whom I am sharing the booth with, had a few paintings on boards warp, but the watercolorists are the ones who took the biggest hit. Even without direct contact, they were warping just from all the moisture.

Sunday June 13, 2010

Sunday was much quieter at the ASLD Summer Art Market (SAM). The weather cooperated in that it stopped raining while we unloaded in the morning, AND we found convenient parking relatively easily. It then proceeded to rain steadily with some efforts towards downpour all morning. The traffic did pick up about lunch time and the sun came out for a short while; enough to get the ground to dry up and the river running through the back of our tent went down to a trickle. It did cloud back up, but the rain did not start back up until we had everything loaded into the car at the end of the day. So all in all, the weather did cooperate to the degree that I did not suffer any damage. I do think I will not do the peg board hanging system again. They work, but they are heavy. I want to go to a wire hanging system.

Above is my side of the tent in the deep dark corner. The pumpkin sold yesterday.

This is Drew, my tent mate's wall.

I had more positive feedback from people in the Denver art world, so again, that was worth so much to me. An old friend, Eddie, not only complimented me but gave me excellent, concrete feedback as to why the alley was so much better than anything else I had up which is exactly what I needed to hear.

I am only writing today because I want to share with other Denver artists a lesson learned. Being new to the world of shipping paintings, the process is definitely an eye opener. And most of the paintings I have had to ship have been large paintings. Friday I took the Alley Hollyhock painting to get it boxed and shipped to arrive in Scottsdale on Wednesday. Unfortunetly, it has a large thick frame on it, being 3" deep and 4.5" all the way around. It added a lot to the cost of shipping, I found out. I went to 4 shipping centers today, one refusing to even pack it, before I found Navis Pack and Ship. Navis is located on 2306 S. Colorado Blvd. The young man was helpful, pleasant, and was going to build the box for the painting to size, instead of fitting it in a too large of a standard size (UPS) for which I had to pay for the extra size and packing materials, of course. With insurance, Navis was about $100 less than what UPS quoted me. The other point was that I needed to include a return label in the event the painting doesn't sell. Navis will do that and charge me only if the label is used. UPS I have to pay up front and then submit paperwork to get reimbursed if the label is not used. In the defense of UPS, I did use them for my two prior art shipments and all arrived in good shape to the best of my knowledge. But if all goes well with this latest and largest painting, Navis will have my future business.
A few things I have learned since I posted this on my other blog: An artist friend of mine said Navis also has an outlet in Colorado Springs for those of you living in the southern part of 1-25. My sister also tells me that she used Navis to ship her art collection and antiques when she moved to Hawaii 4 years ago. Everything arrived in perfect condition.

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture given by Scott Christensen at the Denver Art Museum. The price of the lecture was museum entrance, so that was a bargain. I have a membership. I had no idea going in what to expect, but it turned out he was going to try and answer the Question: What makes a good painting good? To try and answer the question, we first watched a film from the Lincoln Center of a "lesson" in music using Bach's Italian Concerto. We learned that Bach transcribed Vivaldi's violin concertos to learn "to think musically." (I would liken this to an artist copying from a master's painting in an art museum over and over again) And through the Italian Concerto, which was written for a harpsichord only (concertos were typically written for a solo with an orchestra) we learned how Bach did it using the left hand as the orchestra and the right for the soloist; truly fascinating. And a lot of the same terms that were used in describing Bach’s method in music also work for art, i.e. composition, variety, chaos, relationships, order, repetition, modulation, balance, unity and variety. I.e. Too much repetition leads to boredom and too much variety leads to chaos; that subtle shifts are needed; that the difference between great and average is infinitesimal and yet very great indeed. That Bach created tension and variety without being chaotic. He simplified to bring order out of chaos. This ties in to what Kevin seems to be hammering into me, which is to simplify!
Scott Said there are three "p's"...Preparing, i.e. learn drawing, composition, values, tones, relationships (the broken record for aspiring artists); Practice, i.e. do lots of studies and don't think about painting (where have I heard this before, maybe Mark Daily?) and Playing ie where the preparing and the practice come together.
A few things that Scott mentioned that resonated with me in particular were 1. That he had just been to an exhibit of John William Waterhouse paintings; that a few things struck him as very interesting indeed. One was how you could see the strokes of how often Waterhouse had reworked or changed an area to get it to work the way he wanted (I LOVE this as it is always heartening to know how the masters struggle just like we all do) and that out of this whole exhibit, 5 paintings kept drawing him in. That to him, a painting that stayed with someone or kept bringing them back, was a “good” painting.
2. That we have all “seen” a great painting waiting to happen while driving. You stop, you go back, and the scene is gone. The thing is, you saw it at “a glance” while you are driving, but you stop and everything is just there. The scene is overwhelming and the light isn’t what you “saw” at all. So the point is we need to trick the brain and glimpse, not over observe, while painting outdoors and bring that back into the studio as well.
3. What Scott said about saturating the market with our art; I had come to the same conclusion a few months back. We are in such a hurry to be "out there" and we rush around slapping together paintings instead of taking time and really formulating what it is we want to say. I personally was caught up in trying to have enough to post in my blog so that my viewers would not get bored and forget about me between posts. It is hard to compete with the Daily Painting blogs where artists post a painting a day. Small paintings, to be sure, but still it is hard for me to do that working during the week at a day job. I then came to the conclusion that I had to follow my heart and hope the rest would follow. I have slowed down considerably and painting larger forces you to do that anyway. But it was good to hear him say that. When you think about it, Vermeer only had about 35 or so paintings that are attributed to him, but what paintings they are.

And I thank Marie for inviting me to join her at the lecture, not only was it a good time, and new ways to look at "composing" but lots of artist friends were there as well.