Let’s make a date

Well, it’s over. My first Art on the Edge Studio Tour.

Preparation

This last week has been an ever-increasing blur. I posted very briefly last week about trying to get the studio cleaned up. I worked Monday and Tuesday, then took off Wednesday and Thursday to get everything ready. I’m glad I didn’t take off less time! Between distraction gardening and procrasti-painting, it was all I could do to call it done at the end of the day Thursday.

I was thrilled at how good my new investment of a feather flag with my logo on it looked.

In fact, I was pretty pleased with how the whole place looked in the end.

Expectations

As this was my first year on the tour, I didn’t know what to expect. I had my hopes set low, and–spoiler alert–the reality far exceeded them. Each day around 20 people came through, with Sunday being the biggest day in both volume and sales. As you can see by the photos above, I set up all my various paintings on the counter. priced by size. There were 238 paintings, with at least three more found throughout the weekend. Most people really seemed to enjoy looking through the piles. I would estimate that my clever trick of giving a discount on the second painting worked almost all of the time. Yes! Inventory reduction. I can’t tell you how many paintings actually sold, though I will admit the majority of them were small (5″x7″ matted to 8″x10″) or medium (8″x10″ matted to 11″x14″) and they went in pairs. Still, I sold a fair few in the end.

Somewhat disappointingly, I had trouble getting people to view my framed pieces. I had hung them on the walls in the hall and bathroom. Only one person all weekend went into the bathroom, and I only saw two people go down the hall. I set up some of the framed pieces under the counter or near the fireplace, but they just didn’t seem to “click” as a viewing object for my visitors. I will have to consider how to solve this problem over the next year.

Demos & Paintings

In addition to the work of getting out all the paintings, I set up a couple of demos in case anyone wanted to see my process. These are probably not 100% finished.

I also did some painting when I should have been cleaning or organizing.

On Friday, I also worked on finishing this piece just to ease my nerves.

Thank you!

I want to sincerely thank everyone who came by, including friends, family, fellow artists, neighbors, and strangers. If you bought something, I hope you love it as much in your home as you did in my studio. But more than that, watching people react to my (sometimes weird) art really inspired me to keep going. Permit me to recount two of my favorite moments from the weekend.

Stories

On Friday, a group of women came through, clearly enjoying the day and the event. They were probably here for around 40 minutes, and they kept laughing and saying to each other, “Look at this!” as they discovered something else in the art piles. “You never know what you’ll find!” one announced, and I’m considering that for a motto.

The second moment was a little later when a different group came through and they were looking through the paintings. She came across one I did in the Jean Pederson workshop and asked, “What’s the story on this one?” I told her about the workshop and my thoughts behind the painting. She nodded and put it down but came back to it a few minutes later.

She returned to the painting twice more before saying, “This one is just speaking to me.”  She didn’t see what I did (I was somewhat vague on my story), but what she saw called to her.

That was something that I found really enjoyable about the weekend. In general, people seemed interested in my process and the (sometimes silly) stories that make up my paintings. While there were people who came through and just gave everything a cursory survey, there were more who asked, “Where is this one?” or “What’s this story?”

Next Year

Next year’s studio tour will be June 28-30, 2024. So, mark your calendars… I have.