The Making of an (Art Fair) Artist: Part II – The Start Up

Sky’s the Limit

This is the second in a five-part series about my first year’s journey on the art fair circuit. Part one described my initial questioning and seeking of answers.

It took me two months of questions, answer seeking, and second guessing before I decided to assemble a basic art booth and apply to area art fairs and festivals.

Interestingly, my biggest concern became not whether my photography was good enough.

By this time I had photographed a number of botanical photos, mostly macro shots, and I thought I could put together a cohesive show, rather like a garden gallery. I had photographs I liked, photographs I was proud of. And the botanical theme was a perfect fit with the business name I had registered a year earlier, Seeded Earth Studio.

There were other, more difficult hurdles that I was worried about.

The first hurdle was putting together a list of what I needed to make a professional looking booth. There were so many parts to the whole, and the list made me dizzy to read. Another concern was the number of show applications I needed to track. Organizational skills were not one of my strong points and the thought of keeping track of inventory, show applications, and supply orders was almost more than I could bear.

Another major worry was money. I needed to purchase a basic booth set up and inventory, plus pay for ongoing jury applications, booth fees, and travel expenses.

The first hurdle that I overcame was a big one — the money. By way of a small financial windfall from an unexpected source.

Sherpa and I have been avid fishermen for many years. We were never very successful, but we enjoyed fishing together several times a week.  We had an 18 foot fishing boat, just the perfect size for cruising the chain of four lakes in the Madison area.

But without us even realizing it, our habits imperceptibly changed. We began to substitute photography outings for fishing expeditions. More and more, our evenings and weekends were taken up with trips to the local gardens and parks, or road trips to check out photography locations.

When we re-assessed our leisure time activities, we realized we’d only used the boat once in the last year. It became an easy decision to make. We sold our fishing boat and equipment, and used the profits to start up my photography business. (It helped immensely that Sherpa is my most enthusiastic supporter; he thought it was great plan to switch from fishing to art fairs. We never were very good at fishing! And there is always shore fishing when the urge strikes.)

So now that I had money for the basic expenses, I applied to a few shows in Wisconsin and northern Illinois.  To my great surprise, the acceptances came in quickly. I hadn’t expected such success. In just a few weeks, I had six shows lined up from the end of June through the middle of September.

By then it was mid-May. I had less than two months to prepare for a summer of art fairs and festivals. And I had already committed to take a ten day college-graduation-celebration trip with my daughter to the Pacific Northwest.

It was at that point that real panic set in. So I did what made the most business sense to me – I packed and went on my trip with my daughter and we had a wonderful time. I knew all the art fair work would still be there when I got back. And they were…

Part 3: Learning as You Begin

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is living in Tucson for the next eight weeks, exhibiting her photography in art fairs, taking photographs in deserts and desert gardens, and blogging about learning to live on her own. Her mantra is “Bo goes solo!”