After the Silverton debacle, I was pretty nervous going into this show.  The good news was that I was entirely and completely ready to set up, which meant no spending a week cutting mats and things like that.  And for the most part, I spent the three weeks between shows trying to get my head in a better place.  I'd be completely lying if I said that I didn't take things like that a little personally.  And sometimes it takes a little while to prepare myself to sit down and do the work that I do.

There were a couple of things that went well.  First off, I actually sold a handful of pieces (which meant that I turned a small profit.  Phew!), so that was a weight off of my mind.  Secondly, I talked to other artists who had a (maybe not an equally) bad time at the Silverton show.  I don't want to sound like I'm bad-mouthing that show, as I do appreciate the opportunity to show my work, but knowing that a lot of people were in a similar boat as me is another weight off of my mind.

So yeah.  Other than one organizational thing that really irritated me on Sunday (if you're going to force artists to park off-site and atop a gigantic hill AND you promise an artist shuttle back to the lot, I expect that shuttle to actually exist.  The last thing I want to do after a long weekend in the sun and in the middle of a physically demanding tear-down is to hike up a giant, steep hill to go get my truck after leaving my set-up unattended for half an hour waiting for this mythical shuttle.  It's a completely unnecessary parting middle finger to all the artists who are the draw for your show), things went reasonably well.  Again, there were a number of people who were very positive about my work, I had a lot of good conversations, my booth neighbors were all pretty cool.  There was just that one little thing at the very end of the show that left a bad taste in my mouth - like a slightly unsatisfactory ending to a pretty decent movie, and that's entirely within the West Linn Arts Festival organizers' power to fix.  

Well, I'm off to tend to my weekend-long-earned sunburn.  Almost time to get back to work!

c.