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Art Festival Preparation: Apparently, I Need Another Crash Course
It seems like forever since I set up at an art festival. It hasn't been. It was last year.
Apparently, a year is plenty of time to forget almost everything. Or at least to pray you forget almost everything.
Last year's festival was something of a crash course. I figured out which paintings to take, what else to sell, how to set everything up and approximately 147 other things I hadn't thought about until I suddenly needed to think about them.
By the end of the festival, I knew things. I had experience. I would be prepared next time.
That was delusional. Because here we are, knee-deep in art festival preparation, and apparently, I am taking the crash course again.
I did remember the fun parts.
The conversations. The laughter. The people who stop in front of a painting, look at it for a minute and then say, “OMG, that's hilarious!”
I remembered talking about the paintings and watching someone discover some tiny detail that I wasn't sure anyone else would notice.
What I conveniently forgot was everything required to get the paintings there in the first place.
Which paintings should I take? That one question quickly develops offspring:
Which paintings should stay at the gallery? Which ones need frames? Which ones are already framed? Which paintings are too big? Do I have enough small ones? Do I have too many small ones? What about the paintings hanging at my office?
Then there are prints.
Which ones? What sizes? How many?
Calendars. Postcards. Notecards. Certificates. Bags. Price tags. Something to wrap a painting in if someone actually buys one.
Money. Money seems important.
And somewhere in all of this, I am apparently supposed to continue painting.
There are now lists. There may be lists of lists.
I am fairly certain at least one list exists solely to remind me about another list.
Last year, during my first crash course, I considered prints, note cards, postcards, pens, journals and perhaps a traveling flamingo mascot.
A year later, I am beginning to think the flamingo mascot may have been the easiest part of the plan.
Eventually, all of this has to fit inside a booth. Preferably in a way that looks intentional.
I don't want to take every painting I own. I don't want the booth to look like I backed a truck up to the house and emptied the walls into it. I want enough paintings that people have something to discover without making them feel as though they've accidentally wandered into an art-storage facility.
So there are more decisions. Big paintings. Small paintings. Funny paintings. A few quieter ones.
Which brings us back to the lists.
And because apparently preparing for an art festival wasn't enough, there is also StreetsmArts Studios & Gallery.
I'm a regular artist there, with a gallery wall that I change out throughout the year. Normally, deciding what goes up next is its own project.
This time, October decided to make things interesting. The festival is October 3. The gallery needs to be changed out immediately before that.
Which means I need paintings for the October gallery wall and paintings for the festival at essentially the same time, while making sure I don't accidentally plan for the same painting to be in two places at once.
Apparently, paintings remain stubbornly unwilling to do that. Excellent.
I am beginning to understand why I prayed I would forget almost everything.
But I didn't forget the important part.
Eventually, the lists will be finished—or I will simply stop making them. The gallery wall will be changed.
The festival paintings will be hung. The calendars will be stacked. The postcards will be somewhere I can hopefully find them.
I will have forgotten something. At this point, I think we can safely assume that.
And then someone will walk into the booth.
They'll look around for a while. Maybe they'll find one of the ants doing something ridiculous or notice some little detail buried in a painting.
And then I'll hear it. “OMG, that's hilarious!”
And I'll remember exactly why I signed up for the crash course again.
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