Art Festivals

Great art in the great outdoors. An art festival. Sounds perfect, and well, it can be, sometimes.

Rain and hail. High winds and funnel clouds. Heat. Dry heat. Hot heat. The largest known forest fire in Colorado blocking the sun and dropping ash in Denver, 60 miles away. And, sometimes, perfect weather. I have experienced all of the above as a participant in outdoor art festivals.

Getting your art to an art festival and returning home with undamaged art is a challenge, at least for the type of pieces I display. I ran over one of my pieces once, forgetting where I placed it while attempting to secure a good parking spot as someone pulled out.

Once, doing a booth with a group of fellow printmakers at the Art Students League of Denver's Summer Art Market, I watched a friends booth while she took a break. A woman came in and told me she only had forty dollars and was undecided wether to pay the membership fee and join the League or buy a piece she really liked. I told her, that if she joined the League, she could make her own art and she agreed. But she said 'I really like this piece I saw called Little Green Men'. Little Green Men was my piece she had just seen and I talked her out of buying it. Sales are not my forte.

Booth location at an art festival can be critical. At a downtown Denver festival one year I was next to a bus stop. Loud bus noise and obnoxious bus fumes for 3 days. At another small unadvertised local neighborhood 'festival', I was next to the Face Painter and across from the Dunk Tank. The $25 booth fee should have been a dead giveaway that this was not going to be a money-maker, and I realized our booth fees were paying the local bands that played (actually Hemi Cuda was hot).

As an experimental printmaker, I have spent countless hours explaining to countless people what it is they are looking and how I created what they are looking at on the walls inside my art booth. I finally came up with 20 second, 2 minute and 20 minute versions of my explanations. The 20 second version has become very popular and I am working on a 2 second version.

People that come to art festivals can be quite entertaining, all they have to do is show up...

One person asked me what kinds of drugs I used. I am not a druggie, but replied 'Anything I can get my hands on, you got anything good?'.

A woman told her friends that she had to get out of my booth immediately because my art made her dizzy, while others have gazed at a piece for minutes.

Another woman asked her husband if he wanted to go into my booth, 'Hell no' was his reply.

I was told by a woman that if she won the Power Ball that night, that she would return the next day and buy something.

Once my booth was right in front of a popular Denver theater. People waiting to see The Go-Go's play that night congregated near my booth. The security folks were making people pour out their water bottles prior to entering the theater. A woman walked up to my booth and threw the water from her bottle all over the inside of my booth. I yelled at her and she yelled back at me calling me some rather rude things. Some friends of hers explained to her that she was in the wrong. She came to her senses and apologized to me.

I had disappointing news for a woman who inquired if I had anything for five dollars. The next year, in addition to my standard art on display, I brought postcard-sized prints advertised as 'Farmer Johnson's Old Fashioned Hand-pulled Prints - Only $5'. Considering that the prints were cut to size from prints that had flaws of sorts, I sold quite a few and even had a special of 3 for $10.

...people do tell it like it is, and as as result I have received countless compliments on my work. Now, If I can just do something about the weather.