Doncaster Art Fair:

Cost £25 for the stall – a good size corner of The Queen Crafthouse in Doncaster – £65 for transport as I make big work and the car is too small.

I displayed two of my big paintings, framed to 150cm x 90cm, two framed paintings at 100cm x 100cm, 1 framed tomatoes painting at 90cm x 45cm and I built a browser out of mdf to hold a selection of big and small work.

Art fairs are always interesting in that you meet other artists and people you haven’t seen for ages, mostly out of context so that they don’t know what to say other than ‘is this yours?’ or did you do this?​’ You are also in a position to eavesdrop the variety of opinions about your work expressed with no regard to your presence, ‘the perspective is all wrong in this one’, ‘who’d want enormous tomatoes!’ ‘O, I don’t like these’ and so on.

At the same time I got a lot of very nice comments and questions about location and process. But my work is too big for sale at an event like this, and my selection was not focused enough to attract attention. I picked up a lot of advice about doing these kind of events, making sure you have a range of (domestic) sizes, price everything up clearly, greetings cards are a useful item to carry for small sales and follow up business. The majority opinion in the venue I was in was that you don’t know how successful an event it was until later on as people can and do contact you after the event having thought about a purchase.

The picture below got a lot of attention and I gave out more than forty cards, so who knows what might come of the occasion. My favourite comment of the day was from a man of about my age who was with his wife and another couple who he turned to to say “we do like art, we’ve just put a Kandinsky in the downstairs loo.”

Wordsworth avenue 7:15 am