Still in the craft fair vortex, but I reworked #12, the Emu above, which is now denser and darker than before. I am also off the wait list and get to keep the booth I’ve been using until the fair is over at the end of the month. This means I can leave everything there in the big plastic bin my next booth neighbor has loaned me instead of schlepping it home on Sundays. I’m completely out of bird cards and several of the limited edition giclees, so I took in some collage pieces and smaller originals on paper, including a few charcoal studies, last weekend. We were quite busy Saturday but it snowed enough overnight to make Sunday a treacherous mess and for The Canteen to cancel the fair for the day. They did offer to let some of us set up in the tent behind the restaurant that they use for additional space, and I went in because it’s only a ten minute walk there and it didn’t look too bad from my window. The snow, which continued all day, and the wind however were relentless, and the tent wasn’t much warmer than being outside. I left at three and a hot shower thawed me out, although I had to take a nap afterwards because being that cold for that long is exhausting. Experiencing the gerry-rigged tent reminded me how from the time I graduated from college until I moved into my first official Provincetown apartment almost forty years later, none of the places I lived had proper bathrooms. Generally it was toilets in water closets and a shower or tub in the kitchen, but I did spend two years in an Ozark shack with an outhouse and a half mile walk to a well for water. Which meant plenty of opportunities to practice my MacGyver skills with a staple gun, duct tape and plastic tarps or bedsheets. All this along with the terrible news out of LA has me thinking of my friend Marsha from my Ozark times who was murdered by her schizophrenic son. I wrote about her in my May 16th post but it’s the son, fresh out of the psych ward and later also murdered once he was in prison, who is in my thoughts today. He was a beautiful child, a happy baby. Such a waste, so much tragedy. The human animal is truly confounding.

No new birds this week because I’ve fallen into the craft fair vortex, and I’m happy to report all my bills are paid now. I’m waitlisted for this weekend although we are expecting snow. So I might get in and maybe not do any business. We’ll see. I opted for this artist life - the be broke and in debt until you sell something big and pay it all off only to be broke again life - when I decided not to take a tourist season job after the gallery where I worked for ten years closed last fall. Getting that grant in March was enough to cover the lost salary, however gallivanting back and forth to the UK several times this year, plus copays on three eye surgeries didn’t help. But I have no regrets, except for the being broke part, the rest feels like freedom. And a true sense of self.

In the meantime, my craft fair inventory has shrunk considerably, which was the plan, and I’ve been figuring out what to add to the line to fill it out. I’ve already packed some of the charcoal studies and smaller paintings on paper from my 2024 show at The Commons, but that doesn’t cover the lack of cards that used to be my bread and butter. So I’ll introduce a number of my collages since I have a dozen or so cards of Communion, the piece above, to add to the mix. I do however have linocut tools and plates on hand as well as appropriate paper and envelopes, so who knows, I may be printing birds, albeit little ones, sooner than I thought. Ah the dilemma of being an artist with too many balls in the air. PS - Santa says Hello. Onward.

Missed a week - I actually had a post ready which got quickly outdated, so I’m starting fresh today. First of all, there are three birds - #32, the new Cardinal above, and two of the charcoal studies from September that I’ve reworked - #20, the Rooster and #17, the Falcon with the wonky head from the Storks And Such post. There are a couple more early studies I intend to do rather drastic things to, think silver painted backgrounds or cutting the bird out and adhering it to something else. But that’s what studies are for, to experiment with, to play with, since that’s also important in making art. I am still going to go as large as the limitations of my little studio allow, but the printing press at Funk and Schuster, which I’ve mentioned before and where I first thought about creating prints, can accommodate much bigger paper and may be the way to go.

One of the reasons this post is late is I had a booth at The Canteen’s Holiday Craft Fair in Provincetown for the three days after Thanksgiving. It’s outdoors, in fact it’s on the beach, and although I was in a semi-contained booth, I was actually standing on sand. It was fun, although wicked cold and we had to close early Sunday because of rain. I swapped the last two of my mugs for a quart of local honey from the beekeeper in the booth next to mine, made a few interesting connections that are promising, and sold enough to pay off my outstanding bills including the eye doctor and still have a little pocket money. And then The Canteen treated the vendors to a delicious dinner so we could get to know each other better. I’m at the top of the waiting list for a booth this weekend - fingers crossed. Onward.