Brandywine Festival of the Arts - Musing about Art
Well, the car is packed and we're ready to go. Going up to Wilmington (Delaware) today to set up our booth (#F-8) at the Brandywine Festival of the Arts. We applied several months ago and were juried in, along with 250 other Fine Artists and Fine Craftspeople who will be offering our original art for sale in Brandywine Park this weekend. We're excited to be in this new venue and also a bit anxious. We have filled two large suitcases with framed work and prints and assembled all the paraphenalia one needs to do one of these outdoor shows - a tent, display stands, a table, etc etc. And it's all stuffed into Bob's PT Cruiser - master packer that he is, he gets everything in there like one of those puzzles.
I was very excited to see that they used one of my watercolors in their advertising (Ristorante Fontanella is on the bottom row of the ad - scanned from the newspaper which explains the poor quality!! - second from the left). It seemed a good sign that at least the graphic designer who did the ad liked it! Or maybe the images were chosen totally at random - they closed their eyes and threw a dart. Who knows! And I wonder, do people reading these ads pay attention to this stuff anyway??? Do you??
This is sort of a costly experiment for us, between entry fees, hotel, gas and food, not to mention the framing etc. It seems that a good number of the people who have purchased our art seem to come from north and west of here - Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C. - so we thought why not go up in that direction and bring it to them! We're hoping our gamble pays off. The last two shows here in Delaware have not been stellar. We keep blaming it on the economy and I know that is a factor. Seems like if this one bombs we need to devote more time to painting and photographing and consider not doing shows for a while. Now that may seem drastic, but it's how I'm feeling right now. Maybe I've just got the pre-show jitters!
My Studio in the Riverwalk Center for the Arts is almost ready for me to move my supplies in and get to work. I'm ready, mentally, to do it. It's another experiment, to see if I can work in this kind of environment, not holed away in my home studio. This will be a place where other artists are working too and I'm looking forward to the artistic vibe I hope will be there. Visitors can stop by too to see what we're doing and I wonder how much of a distraction that will be - or will the pressure of knowing people can see me working force me to dig deeper, work harder. So much unknown. But like we've done before, we're putting one foot in front of the other, traveling down the path to see where it leads. Thanks for coming along! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Rosemary
I was very excited to see that they used one of my watercolors in their advertising (Ristorante Fontanella is on the bottom row of the ad - scanned from the newspaper which explains the poor quality!! - second from the left). It seemed a good sign that at least the graphic designer who did the ad liked it! Or maybe the images were chosen totally at random - they closed their eyes and threw a dart. Who knows! And I wonder, do people reading these ads pay attention to this stuff anyway??? Do you??
This is sort of a costly experiment for us, between entry fees, hotel, gas and food, not to mention the framing etc. It seems that a good number of the people who have purchased our art seem to come from north and west of here - Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C. - so we thought why not go up in that direction and bring it to them! We're hoping our gamble pays off. The last two shows here in Delaware have not been stellar. We keep blaming it on the economy and I know that is a factor. Seems like if this one bombs we need to devote more time to painting and photographing and consider not doing shows for a while. Now that may seem drastic, but it's how I'm feeling right now. Maybe I've just got the pre-show jitters!
My Studio in the Riverwalk Center for the Arts is almost ready for me to move my supplies in and get to work. I'm ready, mentally, to do it. It's another experiment, to see if I can work in this kind of environment, not holed away in my home studio. This will be a place where other artists are working too and I'm looking forward to the artistic vibe I hope will be there. Visitors can stop by too to see what we're doing and I wonder how much of a distraction that will be - or will the pressure of knowing people can see me working force me to dig deeper, work harder. So much unknown. But like we've done before, we're putting one foot in front of the other, traveling down the path to see where it leads. Thanks for coming along! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Rosemary
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