My First Art Show

It was Saturday April 1st, 2023, and I had never shown my art before.

Alan (my partner) asks, do you want to do a pop-up at Dave's Pub tonight at 9?

An art show?

YES.

New is exciting.

New is motivating.

I don't have a setup though.

Do I even have enough artwork to fill a table?

I start gathering everything that I consider to be "finished" while Alan went to shop for a table and creative ways to display my art. We are a great team, I must say.

I painted all day long, mainly to keep myself from worrying about the show. I find that I can zone out with painting easier than I can with any other activity like playing piano or singing.

I grabbed my brown craft paper and started mixing greens to try to match the trees I could see from my window.

Look at all the different greens I was able to mix! There's no way I could have done that a year ago. Thanks, Chris Fornataro.

I painted the hours away until Alan came back around 3PM. He arrived with a pegboard, a table, and other goodies which made me eager to arrange my art on the table. Would I even have enough pieces?

Within about five minutes, it was evident that yes, I had more than enough artwork to display. Wow. Crazy how I didn't even know how much work I had produced in the last year. I had so many pieces to display, that Alan had to go get more pegs.

He finally came back home to get ready for the show. He was giddy when he saw how great all my art looked with his genius display idea.

With a display, the only part left was the money part. I set up my Venmo (julianne-paints) to match my website and instagram

Easy enough. I was even smart enough to print out the QR code and tape it to my table, so that people could pay me easily.

Alan was also smart enough to buy a huge storage bin for us to transport my collection. I didn't even think about that- which is why I so easily trusted him with the whole process. I used my favorite brown craft paper to wrap my pieces and put them in the bin. I grabbed my plastic shopping bag pile and stuffed it in the box as well so that I could give people something to put their art in. I enjoyed the fact that I was recycling the bags I felt bad about using in the first place.

Alan said it was time to get ready, and as we can tell here, he's the one making sure things get done. I chose my new pink parachute pants and a matching pink shirt. Let's do the monochrome thing- I'm an artist, I thought.

We arrived at Dave's and I was nervous. I was being snippy and short with Alan (neurodivergent folx, where y'all at?) We took the table and our art inside where I was greeted by my beloved friends. Not only had Alan spent the whole day making sure that I could sell my art, he also texted all of our friends asking them to come support me. Despite less than 12 hours notice, SO MANY FRIENDS came to show their LOVE and support.

Just seeing them there already made me feel so loved. On top of that, they BOUGHT my art. They asked questions about MY ART. I was able to obsessively talk about the one thing I actually wanted to talk about. Amazing.

I am so glad that Alan and I are both so energized by new opportunities. Even though I was a bit nervous, all that disappeared as soon as I saw my friends. We could have spent all morning listing the reasons why I wasn't ready, but we didn't. We got moving!

I'm SO thankful we did.