Why I Dread Open Studio Weekend

Back in February, when I committed to participate in it, Open Studio Weekend was just a wisp of a cloud in my otherwise sunny horizon.  As winter melted slowly into spring, the cloud grew larger and greyer.  This week it has ballooned to major thunderstorm dimensions.  It may even be a tornado.

Every year, on Memorial Day weekend, artists and craftspeople throughout Vermont open their studios to curious neighbors, to husbands dragged away from the golf course by their wives, and to devoted friends who don't mind sacrificing a spring weekend to encourage their artist pals.  I have participated in Open Studio in the past, and I remember rejoicing in the number of sales the last time I did it a couple of years ago.  It's not even that much work.  I take my stuff to my friend Dona's (she's an oil painter--click on http://www.artistseyestudio.com/) and we hang out together and walk through the beautiful gardens that she spruces up for the occasion.

But still, I dread it--and not just Open Studio, but craft shows and gallery openings as well.  I'd rather testify before Congress than stand before my work and make conversation with (let alone sell something to) the people who come to look at it.  I can speak before groups large or small, about things I know much or little about, with barely a tremor.  But let some hapless passerby wander over to my sculpture display, and it's all I can do to keep from diving under the tablecloth.

I'm not the only one to feel this way.  I know an artist of advanced years who has been supporting himself with his work for a long time, and who still refuses to be present at the openings of his own shows.  Van Gogh was probably this way too, which would explain why he didn't sell a single painting during his life.  Picasso, on the other hand, was not.

But those two are too far up in the stratosphere to be relevant to most of us.  Alongside the shy, reclusive artists, I have known seemingly ordinary souls who hang their stuff on a wall, hand you a glass of wine, and before you know it you've bought something, without the idea of "pressure" ever entering your mind.  How do they do it?

I'm aware that where talent (I'm talking about the sales, not the artistic, kind) is lacking, practice can fill the gap.  God knows I was nervous the first time that, as an English-challenged 11th grader, I entered an oratorical contest.  But that occasion was followed by interviews survived, courses taught and graduation speeches delivered, until speaking in front of people became as comfortable as chatting with a friend.

The answer, then, lies in aversion therapy--you know, where if you are afraid of spiders you are helped to get closer and closer to one until eventually you find yourself petting its eight hairy legs.  Not only should I be doing Open Studio, but I should join every arts organization that shows members' work, sign up for every crafts fair (and there are a lot of those around here), and enter my pieces in every competition for which they qualify.

My fantasy is that, if I follow this program faithfully, someday before I die I will be able to look the public in the eye, deliver a persuasive spiel, and then allow it to buy something I've made.  In the meantime, because the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single s., I'm girding my loins for Open Studio.  Wish me well.

Art, In This Economy

This is Open Studio weekend around here, when painters, sculptors, glass workers, furniture makers and other servants of Art and Beauty clean their brushes, sweep out the stone chips, mow their lawns, and bake cookies so that accountants, engineers, farmers and school teachers can get to see The Artist At Home.

Ah, la vie boheme! Gauguin in the tropics, Toulouse-Lautrec on the Left Bank, Picasso in his castle, with his women--the art is fabulous, but the life is almost as fabulous as the art. Who hasn't, when buying a piece of art, also hoped to take home, along with the object, a whiff of the artist's life?

There is the notion, born of the Romantic era, that the artist marches to a different drummer. Therefore--and this conclusion must have come along with the Industrial Revolution--the artist's life must be somehow freer, more exciting than the life of regular folk. If the industrial age created this myth, however, the economic upheavals of the postmodern era are in the process of debunking it.

As I wandered from studio to studio to gallery opening today, I saw a lot of work, and a lot of courage. I heard some panic, and some sorrow too--one sculptor told me that he had just learned that a gallery that had been in business over thirty years and carried his work for sixteen had gone bankrupt. And I heard a lot of determination to keep going because...because you gotta paint, gotta sculpt, gotta make jewelry, furniture, whatever, because life wouldn't be the same without it.

In the end, the picture that I came away with from my Open Studio wanderings looked a lot less like Toulouse-Lautrec drinking absinthe on the Left Bank, and a lot more like the old Matisse, with a paintbrush taped to his arthritic hand because what else was there to do? Gotta paint....