My first Open Studios declared success

I’ve been pret­ty busy over the past few weeks. I’ve been work­ing on a draw­ing and div­ing in to that process with a lev­el of dis­ci­pline that I’ve rarely exhib­it­ed, and I’ve been prepar­ing myself for open­ing my stu­dio to large num­bers of peo­ple look­ing to buy or just look at art­work. Tra­di­tion­al­ly here in San Fran­cis­co Open Stu­dios hap­pens each week­end, and my stu­dio is a part of a build­ing with at least fifty oth­er artists, so it’s a good draw.

In Decem­ber I had a print made of a large dig­i­tal project. I want­ed to see how it would come out, as it involved some exper­i­men­tal process­es. I was pret­ty pleased with the result and rolled the prints up and stored them in a tube for sev­er­al months. With the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get my work in front of thou­sands of peo­ple over the course of a week­end, I dug the print out and took it to the frame shop in my neigh­bor­hood, who have always done great work for me.

As I men­tioned, this was not a small piece. To have it framed and put behind plex­i­glass was near­ly $400, and that’s a price whee­dled down from a high­er num­ber. It was sched­uled to be done the day before the open­ing par­ty and I did­n’t know how I’d pay for it when I put the order in.

I start­ed a new day-job con­tract a week and a half ago and I’ve still got some dead­lines for the con­tract work I’d been doing since I left the dat­ing web­site com­pa­ny back in April. Mon­ey has been pret­ty darn tight around here and will con­tin­ue to be until I get my first check from the new con­tract, which is still a week and a half away. Even then it will prob­a­bly be a cou­ple of months before I’m real­ly caught up. So you can imag­ine the deep breath I took before I told the framer to go ahead and do it.

There have been oth­er prepa­ra­tions that I’ve had to do to get ready for this week­end. I pret­ty much spent every evening over at the stu­dio and I took a day off from the new con­tract to do work on the old one so that I could get a last-minute check from that client on the day I went to the frame shop to pick up the work. It was very stress­ful and I did­n’t know whether it was all going to come togeth­er, but I picked the framed piece up Thurs­day night and got it onto my assigned wallspace.

The piece in ques­tion start­ed life as a dig­i­tal pho­to­graph. Through a fair­ly com­pli­cat­ed process sim­i­lar to col­or sep­a­ra­tion for mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers I turned it into a large matrix of col­ored lines that still appears from a dis­tance to be the image it was orig­i­nal­ly. Here is a small detail (click on this small rep­re­sen­ta­tion to the right)

This was imaged onto pho­to­graph­ic paper at 48 inch­es by 60 inch­es. You don’t have to be very close to it to see the lines that make it up, but from sev­er­al paces back the image becomes clear. I’d thought it would be inter­est­ing to watch the piece change as one approach­es or steps back, but I’d nev­er real­ly been able to test out the suc­cess of the work. I’d seen it rolled out on a table, I’d seen the small­er-scale prints, I knew that in prin­ci­ple it should appear like I hoped it would, but until I got the piece up on the wall, I nev­er real­ly knew that it works.

And here it is (again, click to see it more clearly):

It’s a fair­ly impos­ing piece and com­mands atten­tion. It’s pret­ty darn big. I gave it a sig­nif­i­cant (but not unrea­son­able) price tag and then showed up Fri­day night, all day Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. On Fri­day I was asked to explain the work, and after the gen­tle­man asked the price he asked for my con­tact infor­ma­tion. He may nev­er call or write, may nev­er come through, but the fact that I had what appeared to be a seri­ous inquiry. There were a num­ber of oth­ers through the week­end, but none seemed as serious.

How­ev­er, I had some more work up on the walls inside the stu­dio. My pen and ink work did­n’t gen­er­ate any sales nib­bles, although one per­son seemed on the fence about an etch­ing I made a few years ago. What sold? My toy dinosaur pho­tos. (Two of them can be seen here and here) I put four mat­ted 8″ x 12″ pho­tos up and sold one set and two sin­gles, one with­out a mat and the oth­er with an inex­pen­sive wood frame.

So in the end, after all that work and three days of show­ing, I had gross reciepts of two hun­dred and ten dol­lars. That’s not sup­port­ing me, for sure, but I’m pret­ty pleased about it. It more than pays for my rent on the stu­dio space. Grant­ed, that’s only this month and there aren’t shows like this every month, but it’s a start. The impor­tant thing is that I got a chance to get my work out in front of peo­ple and talk about it, get my cards out there and my artists state­ment. I’ve col­lect­ed email address­es of peo­ple that vis­it­ed the stu­dio, and par­tic­u­lar­ly of the ones that made pur­chas­es, so that I can let them know of upcom­ing events or shows where they or their friends might want to buy more work. Fur­ther­more, I got to see inter­est in my work, and who knows? Maybe the fel­low who showed up the first night was seri­ous. I did­n’t expect to make mon­ey this week­end, I just expect­ed to get the expe­ri­ence of doing the work of show­ing my work and get­ting my name and ideas out there. I made an entrance into the San Fran­cis­co art scene, if you will. Every jour­ney starts some­where and this chap­ter of mine start­ed here, this weekend.