Three days in a booth at Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton, Mass.
What a wonderful city… what terrific art… what an exhausting process…
Preparing, choosing, loading, hauling, unloading, hanging, standing.
Then after three days of sitting and standing, and more sitting and standing… The process begins again in reverse.
Lots of WONDERFUL feedback, and some nice sales. It's hard to let the paintings go away though.
The creative quality and integrity of the work of other participants was uplifting. To be surrounded by such beautiful, well-made and diverse art: wearable fabric; hangable fabric; jewelry; sculpture; painting in every medium; prints of every sort…. the energy was tangible.
Northampton is a great town. Many diversions and amusements there, in keeping with the complex interwoven layers of cultures in this town populated by professors, students, farmers, business people and the people who are drawn to a melting pot of ideas and learning. From lovely craft and art galleries, great bookstores; elegant boutiques; every imaginable sort of restaurant; to Walmart.
The show organizers were very positive about my work. They put me on their "Showstoppers" page in their 40 page glossy magazine writing: "This Vermont artist brings a realist's eye, a painterly touch and a draftsman's expertise to her drawings and paintings of nature," along with a few other flattering sentences and a photo of Homecoming.
And to top it all off, on the last afternoon as I was chatting with an onlooker, a woman standing in the aisle caught my eye. She was staring at me intensely. In a heartbeat I realized it was Lorna Hinton Kepes, who I last saw about 15 years ago when we had a similar chance encounter on the peak of Mount Abraham on the Long Trail. Prior to that our last meeting was in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico in 1975. A lifetime ago… We were young, full of hope, with every intention of saving the world.
It's good to see her and find out that we're both still working on it.