New adventures

"I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that no one has been willing to buy." —John Waters

I love what I do. I very much would love to rely on nothing else but selling my art. When I started 7 years ago, I would have never have expected such a warm receipt of what I do by others. At the Edina Art Fair this weekend, I got so many comments like "This is so cool!" and "I really like what you do!". It warms my heart and solidifies my decision to try to carve a life for myself out of what I do. 

However, it concerns me that I have carved myself a nice little niche that I can't expand upon. Again, I love doing the location collages. It's fun to capture a whole place in one piece of artwork and doubly fun to see people's reaction to it. But when I start getting requests for every little small town, suburb and very small college, it takes a little of the fun away. When I tell people "no" when they ask if I have a certain location, I sometimes get stern looks like I hurt their feelings or I get a quick "Well are you GOING to do it?". There are only so many hours in a day and a lot of time goes in to photographing for those collages. If I'm not sure that location will be well received, that time is better spent doing other things.

I've put a lot of effort into creating new collages to display at the Vail Arts Festival. It'll be the first art fair that I won't have any location collages at. It'll be the first art fair where I am judged solely by my other artwork. And I'm terrified. Because here in MN, that artwork may as well be invisible. It hangs in my booth and gets almost completely ignored. It used to take up half of my booth. Half location, half fine art. I got so many comments about how it was "interesting" or "unusual" (some actually came right out and called it weird) that I finally just stopped bringing it. It never sold and I didn't want it to get damaged by hauling it around.

My Facebook and Twitter friends mostly see my new artwork and have given me a lot of positive feedback. This is REALLY encouraging and I'm thankful for it. I feel like I've been divided in two and it's really odd. I'm starting on a new journey of exploring the half of me that really loves getting my hands into my artwork and expressing the things I love, yet the photographer in me still wants to get out and document all of those cities and states in a way that only a local can see it.

I'll probably never merge those two sides, but I'd like them both to come along with me equally rather than having one move forward and the other stay in one place.