The Bellevue Artsfair starts this Friday and I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a long break between shows for summer, so I’m anxious to get back. And Bellevue is one of the best!

This year I’m thrilled to be showing my oil paintings along with my pastels for the first time in Bellevue. And I will have a lot of them after I take down the Metamorphosis show from the Kress Gallery on Wednesday. Show weeks are always busy, but this is especially crazy… after spending today framing and delivering my Alice in Wonderland piece to the Tinman Gallery, I have to take down shows at Pacific Garden Design tomorrow and the Kress on Wednesday before loading the car for the show. Plus the usual million little pre-show details like price tags and artwork lists. And covering my entire studio in plastic so my upstairs neighbor can sand his floors.

SO. Anyway. If you’re in the Seattle/Bellevue area this Friday-Saturday-Sunday, come by the Artsfair! It’s an amazing show and I will have more new and different work than ever before. The details:

Bellevue Arts Museum ArtsFair
When: July 23 – 25, 2010
Where: Bellevue Square parking garage, 510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA
Hours: Friday – Saturday, 9:30 a.m. – 9:30 p.m., Sunday 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.
What I’m bringing: Pastels and Oils
Booth # J-08

Despite more than the normal amount of the Traditional Artfest Rain, Artfest was a great weekend. Friday (the rainiest day) gave artists a chance to catch up with one another. At length. But Saturday and Sunday brought sun and crowds! Thanks to all my customers and friends who support my art habit. Also a big thanks to the Artfest jurors, who honored me with the Tinman Gallery 2-D Merit Award. So nice to know I will be returning to a show that is clearly on the upswing. Which brings me to my last big thank you, again to the jurors, who picked a high-quality, even show.

But, Artfest is over and it’s great to get back to the studio! I’ve missed it lately, since some soundproofing has been going on with the ceiling and everything has been piled up under plastic sheets. But with almost two months until my next show, it was time to put the construction on hold and make the studio back into a studio again.

Art fair season can really mess with creative energy, as getting outside and fiddling with the booth plays perfectly into spring fever. On the flip side, getting to the shows and actually selling some art is the best motivator I know to go paint. This week I played with an idea I’ve had for a while now, resulting in the two “Raintree” pastels pictured above. They will serve as studies for oil paintings which will, hopefully, be ready in time for Sun Valley.

And, the idea of stopping at twenty-four Teacup Oils is out the window. The Teacup Oils have been to exactly one show and I am already down NINE! So six more mini-canvases are stretched, gessoed and waiting for paint and tea-licious titles. Barely back in the studio and there’s more on my plate than I can probably finish before Bellevue. All or nothing… that’s the art life.

p.s. Many of the paintings from my booth at Artfest plus a few more are on display at Pacific Garden Design through mid-July. PGD is open to the public, but if you plan to go, give them a call first to be sure someone is there! It’s a beautiful space with amazing pots for sale (and garden design, of course).

Artfest is upon us! Opening this Friday at noon, it runs through Sunday. I’ll be there as usual (still don’t know what booth!) with new pastels and oil paintings, including my new Teacup Oils – little 6″ x 6″ x 2″ canvases painted on five sides and named after delicious tea flavors both real and imaginary. (Pomegranate Twist, Chamomile Bliss and Guava Mint are shown above)

Something new: this year I will be donating 1% of art festival sales to the ASPCA. I’m calling it my ASPCA Summer of Love. I get asked for a lot of donations every summer from various arts organizations, many of which I know nothing about. This year I decided to choose where my donations went. Since I love animals enough not to eat or wear them, the ASPCA seemed like a good place to start. More on this later.

In the meantime, come to Artfest, enjoy the day, and support the arts by buying real art from real artists!

Artfest

When: June 4 – 6, 2010

Where: Coeur d’Alene Park, 2nd & Chestnut, Spokane, WA

Hours: Friday 12 p.m. – 8 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Last weekend was the show In Belleville, Illinois, and we are back and pretty much recovered. Belleville is a three-day drive from Spokane, if you drive ten-hour days. We drove down in two days. I do not recommend this.

Horrendous drive aside, we arrived to find a very nice little show with a very high quality of art and one of the most helpful groups of volunteers I have ever encountered. This show staff treats artists like rock stars that they think are too skinny. Despite all the work of setting up and working an art fair, I think I actually gained weight with the constant barrage of treats (including homemade cookies in the shape of a #1 to commemorate the shows national ranking).

Once we opened up the booth Friday night (photo of my inexplicably Hello-Kitty-Pink booth above), the supportive and savvy local art collectors quickly relieved me of some of my prized work. The show drew large crowds Friday and Sunday. On rainy Saturday, when the masses stayed home, serious buyers braved the weather relieved to have the show more or less to themselves.

 Sunday morning I unzipped the tent to be startled by a pair of mourning doves fluttering and flapping around the ceiling, perching on my walls and critiquing my paintings. As much as they seemed to disapprove of the art, they very much liked the tent, and refused to budge. We had to leave them there during the artists’ breakfast and shoo them out later that morning. Fortunately Sprayway glass cleaner is a good multi-tasker.

The show went well overall which made for a pleasant ride home. During our more leisurely three-day return trip, we saw some sights that in a former life as a T-shirt illustrator, I drew repeatedly and ad nauseum: the Corn Palace, Mount Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, Sturgis. We even stopped in at Wall Drug. I had no idea you could see all of them in one day. If only I had seen a wolf, that day would have been complete, because yes, in my past life, I made WOLF SHIRTS. How cool am I.

Onward.

(p.s. I documented this show from the road on my Facebook fan page. To follow future odysseys, “like” my page here.)

After last year I was absolutely done with my art fair booth. No more changes. Ha.

As always on the long trip back from Sausalito last year, Paul and I, sick of tedious setups and tear-downs, discussed how we could make things easier. Of course it would be easiest to just skip all the extra stuff I’ve added, set up the Pro Panels and be done with it. But if you have read my previous stories (rants? storants?) about how all of that came to be, you may understand that at this point I am kind of attached to the look.

So how, without sacrificing the basic feel of the booth, to make things easier? Well, we came up with a plan. And although this plan will admittedly make life easier in future, it did definitely NOT make my life easier the past few weeks.

First order of business was to redesign the naugahyde “baseboards.” The current ones were frankly a giant pain in the ass to unpack, wrap on the walls, then unwrap and re-pack for every show. Worse yet, despite all my loving care and handmade individual flannel bags (yes really), they were starting to look pretty bad. The stain that I spent weeks putting on over the past few years was, predictably, coming off.

 I think it was Paul who came up with the idea to make one permanent “baseboard” per wall that stayed on at all times—brilliant! So, back to the upholstery store for about a mile of new, copper naugahyde that DID NOT NEED TO BE STAINED. Yay. Then I had only to cut then sew about 300 (really maybe 16) loops of the stuff, pop them on the bottoms of the walls, and hot glue foam inside to keep them from sagging. Oh, then go back to the upholstery store for 15 yards of bungee cord to keep them from sliding down from the weight of the foam. And… six months later… Done! (OK, so the breakdown on that was actually 5-1/2 months of procrastination and maybe two weeks of actual work. But still.)

 Then, on to the wooden top rails. They looked pretty nice and were in good shape, but had problems of their own. They were unwieldy to transport, and my original design severely limited wall arrangement options. Every year I made more and more rails to gain a few more possible booth layouts, until eventually at each show we ended up storing almost as many as we used. They needed to be modular, to be one-size-fits-all. I took on this problem, and after a few days came up with a design inspired by a combination of Greene and Greene’s Gamble House stairwell and Tinkertoys.

The new design had one separate top rail for each wall, all the same, all interchangeable. Various simple connectors—straight, corner, and end pieces—would hold everything together. The scary part: the new rails would be made from the old ones. After that first chop there would be no turning back. Terrified, I procrastinated even longer than for the baseboards. But with a show just a few weeks away I was out of time. Luckily, after a week or so more of cutting, routing, drilling, sanding and staining, I now have a simple lightweight system that looks surprisingly not so different from the original. And as a special bonus, I still have all of my fingers! Hooray!

Finally, Major Booth Revision Number Three is complete. Today I took advantage of my trial run to take some booth photos for next year’s show entries (see top of this post). So that’s it then. No more booth revisions. No “Evolution Part Four.” That’s a promise to me.

Want more? Read Evolution of an Art Fair Booth Part 1 and Part 2.

This week has ended on a definite high note. Yesterday, I finished the last of my twelve miniature oil paintings. Today, I got invited to bring them to Sun Valley and Artfest. Nice! Of course I’ll be bringing pastels, too. But at this stage, getting in with oils still feels like an accomplishment.

A confession: I very nearly didn’t send in my application to Sun Valley this year. Last year the show was a little rough for me, to say the least. Economic troubles hit the area hard, and we artists definitely felt it. I vowed to be strong and wait a year before applying again. But months later, after some profitable shows and a long winter, I caved at first sight of a jury deadline notice. Because whatever else it may be, Sun Valley is seriously fun. And I was NOT going to risk missing out on a KB burrito—not deliberately, anyway.

But first, there’s Artfest. Or not, actually. For the first time ever, Artfest—my mellow, ease-me-into-the-season hometown show—is not first on my schedule. By the time Artfest rolls around this year, I’ll have opened my oils exhibit at the Kress Gallery in Spokane, then driven to Illinois and back for Art on the Square. I sure hope I can adjust to all of these gold-plated problems, as my friend Vicky describes them. I’m looking forward to trying. Just a few more “little” projects to get through beforehand. But that’s a story for another day.

(Above: three of the twelve miniature oils, currently untitled. What can I say, I’m busy.)

Now after all this business about going big, it’s time to go the other direction. Last week I ordered some tiny canvas stretchers the same depth as my large canvases, making some nice, chunky little 6″ x 6″ x 2″ supports for a dozen soon-to-be paintings.

I’ve always really enjoyed small work. I love the idea of tucking an original painting into a bookcase, a mantel, a windowsill or a hundred other unexpected spots.

Since I began selling at art fairs, I’ve always included some miniature version of my work in an effort to make original art available for a relatively low price (and for those avid collectors without another inch of available wall space). Although I did offer some reproductions of my work the first year, I decided to discontinue them and focus exclusively on original art. While the miniature originals may not be quite so potentially profitable as repros, I feel good about making them. I also find that I get along much better with my printmaking neighbors at shows.

Up to now my only miniature works have been in pastel, but since I began showing oils, it followed that I should make oil minis as well. The little canvases pictured at left will be my first efforts. I’ve always loved the almost-sculptural look of chunky, cubular little paintings. I’m so excited to see how they turn out. I’ll post some favorites soon!

Things feel a little scattered now… I have the neverending cold and only made it to the studio sporadically this week. I did manage to complete my oil version of Springrise (above), which felt pretty good under the circumstances. It was one of those paintings that just falls off the fingers, then in what should have been the last few minutes I went too far with part of it and had to wipe it down and start over—twice. I was afraid I wouldn’t finish at all today which was pretty annoying considering I expected to walk in, dab at it a few times and walk away victorious. I just kept thinking of John Singer Sargent as I wiped at it with my Gamsol-soaked rag… he is reputed to have wiped down parts of his amazing paintings multiple times to keep that “fresh” look to his brushstrokes. It’s scary, but it works. I ended up somewhat happier in the end. Sargent, on the other hand, ended up with Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Onward.

And now for something completely different…

It’s not really news per se, but I just got my acceptance email for Art in the High Desert. After last year’s Benchmark Award, I knew I would be in the show, but I have to say it’s still exciting to get that “Congratulations!” email. Especially if you are a Big Dork. But I’m not naming names.

More on the subject of Big Dorks…

I’m loving my studio right now. It is packed with fresh art, just like it usually is this time of year. I think it’s more noticeable this time, perhaps, because unlike my previous studio, it started out big and empty. A 10′ x 11′ room can only look so empty with two shelving units, a desk, a table, a taboret, two easels, two air purifiers, photographic light stands, a roll of canvas, a chair, a few rugs and various and sundry leftover drawings. But 675 square feet can swallow up all that plus that much more again and still seem cavernous. Which is why I was hit with a little teeny tiny bit of dread recently… soon there will be festivals and shows to hang and all the paintings will be gone and it will be empty again. Which is always just a little bit sad.

For photos of the studio as it looked last week,