Finally, Success!

Last weekend my friend Erika and I did our first art fair.  We had a booth at the Glenwood Ave Arts Festival in Rogers Park, right around the corner from my apartment.  WE KILLED.  It was so much fun, we were a lot more successful than we thought we would be, and we got a lot of good feedback from people.

As we were setting up our tent we were saying, "Oh no, we're going to look like such amateurs, we have no idea what we're doing..." but it came together really well aesthetically, especially the second day.  We both had paintings and jewelry, and I had pottery and little handmade journals as well.  We had three tables set up and arranged in interesting ways, then paintings hanging from the side.  I think the result was very eye-catching, then we had a nice flow from one table to the next, so we had a lot of visitors to our tent.  Most people just looked around, some people wanted to talk to us about our work, and some people bought stuff.  I had business cards right in front, and a lot of people were picking up my cards.  I've already had one person contact me asking me to do another fair next weekend, but the entry fee is $350...so, unfortunately I can't do that.  But it was flattering that he asked!

This is what our tent looked like:

All in all I sold 8 paintings, three pots, and one pair of earrings.  To be fair, most of the stuff I sold was to people I know, but that's ok!  My parents bought my Delicacies triptych, my friend Libbey bought Georgia O'Keefe, Noel bought my Mushrooms, Jake bought the Lightbulbs, and I made two little skull paintings specifically for the festival and a stranger bought one and my friend Kasey bought the other.

I feel like I finally broke the seal in selling work, and now all I have to do is keep the momentum going.  I also feel like I got some recognition at this festival.  People took me and Erika very seriously as artists, and probably assumed we were a lot more experienced and professional than we actually are.  I can now say I've sold some paintings and had a couple shows.  I'm setting up another small one today at this cafe called the Kitchen Sink, and then another bigger one at Dolce Casa Cafe.  Since I've now sold 6 large pieces, and I have two simultaneous shows coming up and another one in October, I've got to get to work making new paintings! This is the only new one I have other than my little guys above:

Shiny Things Three
Acrylic on Canvas
16" x 12"

Not Much Goin' On

It's August, and I always feel like there is this stagnant air to this month.  We're all trying to slowly savor the last days of summer before the world kicks into gear again in September.  The heat is oppressive, though not so much today.  Our air conditioner broke, so we keep the shades drawn and the lights off all day, which contributes to this feeling I have of pungent, melancholy bliss.

I should really get out of the house and go do something.

I went on vacation a little over a week ago.  My mom and I went to Seattle for my sister's baby shower, then I went to Olympia and hung out with my friends Nick and Carlos, then back to Seattle, then to Portland with my sister and Carlos.  It was busy, and I guess I was expecting inspiration that didn't come.  We went to the ocean, and it was dreary and ugly.  We went hiking around the Cascade River Gorge and saw a lot of pretty waterfalls, but I never got that breath of air that felt like I was really somewhere else, unique and different.  There were too many other people around.  But I have come to the conclusion that I need to live somewhere like Portland where I can go on day or weekend hikes at the whim.

I have one new painting, and it is about the Northwest.  Oddly, I had finished most of it  before I even left.

Northwest
Acrylic on Canvas
20" x 16"

I remember being at beaches in Washington that had these really cool caves and rock formations  when I was a kid.  Weird things wash up on the beaches, at least they are weird to me.

Little Experiment

Usually my process of painting is to just work on one at a time.  I don't start a new one unless my previous one is completely finished, even if I'm working on a series.  This time around I decided to work on two paintings simultaneously, that have nothing to do with each other thematically, and document the process.  The only thing these paintings have in common is that I was using some  elements of steampunk in them.

The Heart of Captain Kurtz
Acrylic on Canvas
10" x 20"

This painting is about the character of Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  The novel was written at the height of the steam engine (the main character is in the Congo building a steamboat) and also takes place during one of the darkest times of history.  

The Machine
Acrylic on Canvas
16" x 20"

Summer

It's been about 95 degrees for the past week.  We finally got air conditioning in our apartment, so once again we can breathe and move around.  Chicago has such awful, intolerable weather most of the year, I don't know why we all continue to live here.

My paintings have been up at Beans and Bagels for about a week now, and so far no bites from potential buyers.  I didn't leave any business cards with them, but I'm picking a bunch up from the printing place today and I'll drop them off tomorrow.  By the way, never go to Kinko's.  That place is an awful, evil corporation with nasty, incompetent employees.  Go to your local business instead.

Check out the new work:

Fresh Fruit Coup
Acrylic on Canvas
18" x 18"

I really like this one, I'm really into these hearts.  My boyfriend is getting so sick of me painting hearts over and over again but too bad.  They're fun to paint and I love how they look.

Luxury
Acrylic on Canvas
12" x 16"

I wanted to make a really ugly creature in an ugly landscape beautiful.   She and papa vulture are decorating their nest because even vultures have the right to live luxuriously.

Reverse Organic
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

This one is a little different, and I'm not too crazy about it, though people who have seen it have given me positive feedback.  I wanted to make an inorganic object look natural.

First Exhibit!

Today I put up my first exhibit at Beans and Bagels, 1812 W. Montrose.  It was really awesome to see a selection of my paintings up on a wall together.  I think it looks great.  They are for sale, but mostly I'm just excited for people to see my work.  This is the first of three cafe exhibits I have lined up, and I just want to get my name out there and hopefully I'll sell a couple paintings in the process.  It's kind of weird to send my babies out into the world- (anything could happen to them, coffee spillage, psychopaths, earthquakes, etc)- but that's what they're made for!

I took a really terrible picture of them with my phone, I'm going to go back and take a better one with my camera.

I had to climb up really high on this ladder to hang the ones on top, it was kind of scary.  I also put labels next the paintings on the bottom, but I took this picture before I put them up.  This is eleven paintings, but several of them are meant to be viewed and sold as sets.

Go check 'em out!

I Haz Website Now

I decided I needed a professional looking website as I have a couple of exhibits coming up.  It was kind of a lot of work, and I probably paid way too much for the whole package (domain name, web hosting, design templates...) but I'm very pleased with the result.

www.sarahcurllarsonart.com

 I remember I had to make a website freshman year of college for a graphic design class and mine was pretty horrendous.  We built them from this really bad Adobe program that no one uses anymore and the color got skewed when they were published, so it made my already bad design look even worse.  I didn't understand design at all then. Not to say I do now, but I have an idea that a website should be clean, easy to navigate, and eye-catching.  It's not about cramming as many weird little images and superfluous design elements onto a page as possible.  That's one of my pet peeves, in fact: badly designed websites.  When I'm perusing yelp looking for a restaurant to go to that night, I won't go to one that has a bad website, even if it has good reviews and the menu looks delicious.  It just makes you have less respect for that business.  So I hope people like my website.

What else is new...I've been hard at work in the ceramics lab.  I've been pursuing the same theme of my paintings with my pottery.  Mostly I just make these little vases, then add stuff to them and carve them.  My friend told me that I'm not very adventurous, but all my vases turn out very unique.  I also bought a set of underglazes with a gift certificate my sister gave me for my birthday, so I'm super excited to use them! I like bright colors, if you hadn't noticed by now, and that's hard to achieve with the glaze selection available.

Here are some pictures of some of my pots:

I Think I Need to Slow Down

I've noticed that I churn out paintings at kind of an alarming rate.  Sometimes two a week.  I can't stop, I finish one and I start the other right away.  I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about making art, because the last couple paintings I've done I haven't been that pleased with.  I should probably take more time to think them through, work on them, re-work them, study them, make changes, etc.  But I don't. Instead I just keep spitting them out.

I feel some pressure to make more because I have four upcoming shows- Beans and Bagels in July, the Kitchen Sink in August, the Glenwood Arts Fest August 17th and 18th, then the Common Cup in October.  I'm also going to submit a few to a LGBT pride show at the Kitchen Sink in July.  So, in the event that I actually sell my paintings, I'll need to have more for the subsequent shows.  So, here I go, churning them out:

The Factory
Acrylic on Canvas
24" x 18"

This is the finished version of this painting.  I added a couple more jellyfish and touched up a few details.

The Plight of the Lovebird
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 18"

No Rain in the Desert
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

Betsy Johnson
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 12"