Casey always manages to work his magic so we can take everything with us to art shows. There really is never an inch to spare. The planning and prepping ahead of this moment takes about a week, and I always pray I’ll come home with less but with the art market being the way it is, it hasn’t really worked out lately. 

{LOVE these birds. Like, I’m madly in love with them.  Mr. Green and Mr. Purple. They aren’t up in the gallery yet so this is the first time you get to see them}

The drive took longer than it should have but we managed to set up the tent and hang most of the art before it got to be too dark Friday evening. Saturday morning at 4:30 am, I wake up from a nightmare of seeing my tent, with all my art in it, being picked up by a big storm… Thankfully, the tent was still standing when we arrived in the morning, but we had thunderstorm after thunderstorm and a couple of tornado warnings throughout.   

{Miss fabulous Lisa Ashinoff whom we were staying with. She rocks.}

We stayed with our artist friend, Lisa, who is based in Virginia Beach and does art shows up and down the east coast. You don’t see many young, blond women doing the art show market so we bonded right away when we met during a show in Cape Cod last year.  

Lisa has won several awards for her art recently (sometimes art shows will have awards they give out ie. best in show, best in acrylics etc.), and though we didn’t win any monetary awards during Seawall, we won the hearts of the kids. Both of us received “Kid’s Choice Awards” 🙂 Adorable.  

One of my awards came from a very shy little girl who clearly wanted so badly to tell me that she loved Mr. Purple but had to speak through her mom. I believe she wanted to give me the award as well but was too shy at the moment as she later came by to give it to me. Again, she didn’t say anything but her eyes and heart spoke a million words a minute. I was very moved.  

{Casey and I at breakfast, full of hope thinking “today is the day when my art will get new homes!” Ah the innocense.}

We fell in love with Virginia Beach’s own Doc Taylor’s breackfast menu and went both days. We also had delicious tapas at Pacifica Little Bar Bistro, and amazing sushi that magically appear next to my beer Saturday night. Yum. 

{Open! We’re open, but where’s all the people?}

Sunday’s weather forecast looked promising but it didn’t last long. It rained on and off all day long and really dark and weird-looking clouds would roll by. It was just very odd weather and unfortunately, it scared all the people away. 

{My view most of Sunday… } 

What you do for 12 hours at an art show when there’s no people and customers around… This is something we only do when we need to, to stay sane pretty much. Otherwise we really want to cater to the people who have come out to see us. Most of the times we’ve driven for many hours to participate and we don’t want to miss the chance to interact with visitors. 

{my dinner somewhere along our 5 hour drive along I-95}

So how did it all end? With a big bang of course. Casey and I decided to wrap up early to get on the road. Little did we know that there was a big storm coming. Normally it takes us 2 hours to break down but we rush through it with dark clouds quickly coming towards us. Remember my tent gear needs to go in first in the car? Well, that also means that most of my original art is unprotected from rain for a large portion of the break down. My heart was in my throat most of the 45 minutes it took to get everything packed into the car… and yes, pretty much everything came back home.  As we turned the key in the car, still breathing heavily and drenched with sweat, the skies opened up. Just in time… and not an inch to spare.

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xo,
e.