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What a wonderfully busy life artists lead. Many of the artists I know are retired, and one would think that would allow them more time to do what they love. It does, but it also allows them to fill their time with more commitments and participate in more activities. And ironically, many of them actually get busier. They may not be worrying about a full-time career, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t replaced it with something else.
I’m not retired. My career in art-making has shifted over time to different modes of expression and practice, but however I’m doing it art has always been central to my life endeavors. I worked professionally making theatre costumes as a technician for years, then moved on to designing and teaching, and now I’m in a less collaborative form of art-making as I sell my prints and greeting cards.
But it’s still how I make my living. I now sell my work at in-person events instead of relying upon a marketing team and a box office to do it for me, but I’ve always been aware that art has to find the right people to value it regardless of its form. Instead of audiences coming to see my work in a theatre, I have to put myself out there to reach them where they are. I have to go to them. One of the ways I do that is vending at various street fairs and festivals. I’ve been doing Friday Night Market in Eureka, but this last weekend, on Sunday, June 28th, I also did the Arcata Fairy Festival.
The Fairy Festival is one of my favorite events of the year. It is light, happy, filled with children, and has off-the-hook cosplay! The music is gentle, there are lots of lounges to sit and relax, and the attitude is literally magical. We have a great time.
This weekend it was incredibly windy. Our booth took a beating, and we lost a framed print that got swept off its stand to crash to the ground. I was lucky I had enough stock on hand so I could stuff all the greeting card display racks tightly to prevent the cards from blowing away. We are lucky to have sandbag weights to hold our tent poles down, but some tents almost turned into sails! We didn't have any neighboring tents around us to break the wind, so we were free-standing. Our tent shook.
Still, we passed out a series of limited edition greeting cards to kiddos who stopped by our booth, and even some glitter jar necklaces that a friend of ours made for us to give away.
The wind at the Sunday came hard upon a Friday Night Market two days previously on June 26th that was wet and rainy. The edges of our tablecloths got soaked, and we had to arrange the interior of the tent in a different configuration to mitigate rain damage. I even dropped my iPad, which cracked my screen, and I'm having to get it repaired (which is a total nightmare). Thank goodness my husband was calm about it. We were passing it off to each other and mutually dropped it, so both of us were to blame. He jumped on the Apple repair site immediately and had the situation well in hand before I could freak out about it. So we made it through, and sold more than we thought we would.
Our Weather Card got two hole punches: Drizzling Rain and 30mph+ Wind Gusts.
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I want to share my latest pieces, too. I’ve made several new birds in the last month—more than half of them requests from various folks who stopped by my booth. A Goshawk, a Western Tanager, a Cinnamon Teal, a Barn Swallow, a Pigeon, an Pileated Woodpecker, and a Black Oystercatcher. Eight new birds.
All of the birds are quite different. The goshawk isn’t specific to Humboldt County, but the area is within their range. The Western Tanager is more specific to the western US, and the Black Oystercatcher is a shorebird found only along the Pacific Coast. The Cinnamon Teal is often found here in marshlands. Pigeons are everywhere, and the Barn Swallow is pretty common across the world as well.
I have them all available as greeting cards on my shop.
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