Craft Fair

I paint a canvas every Sunday afternoon, just something small about the size of an album cover. I'm working with oils. I've been painting with acrylics for decades, but I'm new to oils and the techniques involved are very different so I'm having to relearn a lot of things. I've been at it since the beginning of the year and I now have a stack of canvases which I'm ready to sell.

Bess meanwhile has been painting rocks for a year or more, decorating stones with mandalas and related designs of increasing complexity. She protests that she has no artistic ability, but the evidence of her work suggests otherwise. She's posted pictures of her rocks on facebook and strangers have asked to buy them.

Having both arrived at the same place, we've decided to hit the craft fairs, to try selling our work from a stall. We've looked at a few such events and have settled on a fair held at a retirement community in Boerne as a good place to start. The pitch costs twenty dollars and there are no weird restrictions about bringing our own food. We had a look at the fair held regularly at the Black Swan Inn just down the road, and they were asking fifty dollars a pitch with a ban on anyone inclined towards self-catering, presumably so as to guarantee business for whichever food trucks might be in attendance.

So now it's Saturday morning. We're up early. We've fed the cats and we drive out to Boerne to set up, ready for when the doors open at nine. I've spent the last week making a free standing wooden frame upon which I can display my canvases, seven foot tall, but it all comes apart so that it's no big deal getting it in the car. It's made with beams of poplar bolted together and I'm quietly proud of it. My inner pessimist has already predicted that no-one will give a shit about my paintings, but I will have at least one Hank Hill type conversation about the pleasures of woodworking and craftsmanship.

We arrive at the Kronkosky Senior Center around eight and it takes about half an hour to set up. I bolt my frame together and attach rows of canvases using small G-clamps. Bess spreads a black cloth across the circular table we've been allotted, then unwraps all of her rocks. There seem to be hundreds of them, as well as a few vinyl albums she's repurposed and decorated with similar designs.

The hall is of medium size, most likely a canteen during the week. There are fourteen other pitches, described thus in my diary:

• Custom hair bows by emo-country goth chick, her Tristan-esque boyfriend*, and their dog.
• Black lady selling unpleasant kitsch ornaments repainted in clashing dayglo colours.
• Overcharging artist community of wizened burnouts asking $200 for the one painting I actually liked.
• Crazy grandma in red, selling items of redwear.
• First timer selling mason jars as tissue dispensers and personalised Starbucks cups.
• Cactus lady.
• Quilts advertising John Deere heavy agricultural machinery.
• Crochet stuff lady.
• Hostile jewellery lady who writes books about driving the arrogant British out of Ghana.
• Gay men selling pots of plants mixed in with gnome housing.
• Blind artist, formerly a Brigadier in the USAF.
• Tacky arrowhead art.
• Soap woman.
• Creepy custom handbag guy.

Nine o'clock ambles past, and we eventually realise that the doors are indeed open by virtue of three or four very old people seen wandering amongst the stalls. They don't seem to be buying anything, but it's clear that they aren't selling either. The big rush comes about an hour later with numbers up in the sevens and eights, and all very old.

'These are people from the retirement home,' I tell Bess.

'I get the feeling they didn't advertise very well,' she says.

'How far are we from Boerne, like the main strip?'

'About a mile.'

The main strip of Boerne is crammed with stores selling antiques, trinkets, nick-nacks, collectibles, and other junk, and it gets pretty busy, particularly at the weekend and on a warm day such as today. We should hopefully begin to experience some of the run off any minute now. It's still early. No-one goes out before noon.

'I'm bored,' I say, 'I think I'll have a sandwich. Do you want one?'

'Not yet.'

I've made sandwiches, corned beef for myself, ham and mustard for Bess. I've also made pasta salad and filled a couple of flasks with iced tea. I eat one of my sandwiches, reasoning that I'll save the other one for later as something to look forward to.

No-one is looking at my paintings. They are behind us but against the wall at an angle. I wonder if it might not occur to people that they are for sale, that they're just part of the hall, but I'm not sure what else I can do. It's not like they can't be seen. I've been painting simple still life compositions - flowers, cacti, and a couple of deer skulls, because these are things I see in Texas. It occurs to me that paintings of skulls might not be the sort of thing likely to sell well in a retirement home.

'These are nice,' an old woman coos over Bess's rocks. She circles the table picking up various examples for closer inspection, then wanders off to buy a fucking horrible plaster clown painted orange and green from the next table along.

Bess and I sit and stare at the woman's wares, scarcely able to believe anyone would try to sell such abominations. We guess that she goes around thrift stores buying cheap, kitschy ornaments from the sixties and seventies, then brightens them up a bit. Somehow she found a way to make that stuff worse. We should probably be impressed.

'What's with the woman in red?' I ask.

There's a round old lady at the other side of the hall dressed entirely and flamboyantly in red. Even her hat is red. All the clothes for sale at her table - all hand made by the look of it - are red.

'It's some sort of senior thing,' Bess explains.

'Like black power for old people?'

'Kind of.'

'So cute!' Another woman is examining a rock. 'My grandson will love this!'

The rock is one of the three or four that I've painted with silly cartoon characters, just little things which take about five minutes to do because Bess asked me to do them. This one is a banana with a face and a big grin - the sort of thing one used to see in the margins of comic strips by Leo Baxendale.

'Three dollars,' says Bess, and we have our first sale of the day. I'm a bit embarrassed that it's one of mine.

Another hour dribbles past.

Aunt Edi shows up. She has driven all the way out here to lend moral support, but also to buy a painting from me. It's for her friend Becky who is visiting from Phoenix, but who is presently staying in San Antonio. Edi takes photos with her phone, and Becky relays that she is interested in a particular painting of the nopal and agave cacti in our garden.

'How much?' asks Edi.

Going by the shite I've already seen at other craft fairs, I'm underpricing myself, but I've divided my paintings into two groups - those which actually I like, and those which I'm not too sure about, for which I'm asking $60 and $40 respectively. I'm trying to sell paintings, and I'm going by what I myself would pay. I'm not trying to skin anyone.

'That's forty dollars,' I tell Edi.

Becky relays that she is very happy with this and so that's another sale. She also relays that she was looking for something which would remind her of Texas when she heads back to Arizona, and so my painting of cacti apparently ticks all of the right boxes. The strange thing for me is that the painting was my first effort, one I could never quite decide whether I liked it or not. It was the one during which I learned that you can't paint in oils using techniques learned from working with acrylic, so if it came out okay - as Becky clearly believes - then it was in spite of me. I didn't actually anticipate anyone ever wanting to buy it, so that makes me happy.

Edi takes a seat and shoots the breeze with us for another hour, then leaves.

Bess eats a sandwich.

A couple of people buy a few of her painted rocks.

An old guy asks, 'How many records did you ruin making these?' He means the vinyl albums upon which Bess has painted her designs. She picks up job lots of junk albums no-one wants and decorates them, because it's 2018 and no-one sane still cares about Ferrante & Teicher's Bouquet of Hits collection.

'Ha! Ha!' we respond because we can't tell whether the old guy is joking or just being a cunt.

Noon arrives and I do a circuit of the hall to see what other people are trying to sell. I've waited until noon so as to break up the day a bit.

Our fellow first timer seems nice, but the stuff she's selling - and which people are actually buying, it should be noted - seems weird to me. The personalised Starbucks cups are, as described, generic plastic cups from Starbucks to which she has added Mark's Cup, for one example, perfectly lettered and everything. I'm not sure who would want to buy such a thing - someone called Mark, I suppose.

I stop at the other stall trying to sell oil paintings. They seem like old hands at this thing and there's a bunch of people at the table. Their canvases are huge, some vaguely representational, nothing too kitschy, and a few abstracts, but the sort of abstracts which tend to be painted by people who paint abstracts because they otherwise can't actually paint.

'These aren't all by one person?' I ask.

'There are three of us,' the woman explains. 'We're an artists' community.'

Of everyone here today, they seem the most at odds with a consumer demographic which will pay for a unicorn in violet, silver and turquoise.

'How much is that one?' I indicate a small portrait of a woman, something vaguely post-impressionist and quite nice.

One of them picks it up and studies the reverse. 'Two-hundred.'

Fuck me, I don't actually say, but I think it. 'Well - good luck,' I offer as a fellow artist trying to sell to senior citizens, a group notoriously reluctant to part with their money.

I pause at the jewellery stall because there are books. I pick one and study the cover.

'I wrote those,' the woman tells me in a defensive tone.

I read the blurb on the back, something about people of Ghana pitted against the arrogance of the English colonial forces at the turn of the nineteenth century.

'I know all about the arrogance of the English,' I chuckle in an attempt to break the ice, and to convey that I'm impressed by anyone who has published their own novel.

'Have you been there?'

'Well, I'm from there.'

'Where are you from?'

'England, I mean. Not Ghana. Have you lived in Ghana?'

'Yes, I lived in Ghana.'

I guessed this from what is written on the back of the book, and because her accent is an unfamiliar hybrid of something or other.

'I've been to North Africa. Well, Morocco, which I know isn't the same.'

She looks at me.

'I lived in London. I knew a few blokes from Ghana.'

'The novels are ten dollars each.'

'Well, I'll probably look back a bit later.' I smile, unsure how best to remove myself from her strangely frosty presence.

Maybe she just hates the English.

Back at the table, we eat our pasta salad. Bess has sold a few more rocks.

The lady in red is now browsing. 'These are very nice,' she says. 'I'd buy one but I'm trying to get rid of everything before I die.'

The organisers asked to stay until three, but a couple of tables have already given up and gone home, and it's clear that there isn't going to be an early afternoon surge.

Bess goes off in search of soda.

The woman with the horrible clowns picks up a rock as she passes by our stall. 'You did this?'

'My wife painted them.'

'I can't even draw a straight line!'

I smile because I don't know how else to respond.

Bess returns and I relate the exchange for her consideration. We both look at the table of dayglo clowns and Disney characters and wonder how she's managed to sell anything.

'Did you hear what she said to the goth chick?'

'No,' I say.

'They were talking about their dog, and how it's a service dog. She just said, I hate dogs!'

'What a lovely woman!'

We sit and watch as more tables vanish like stars going out during the final heat death of the universe.

'I sure have heard a lot of country music today,' I say.

We've been tuned to a country station since we got here, twanging and whining across the hall, hour after hour. That said, it's probably not so much country music as what we now have instead of country music - which is like country music but with autotune, trap drum machine pinging away, and Jed, Jethro, or Tammy whining about poor cellphone reception in rural areas.

At two we decide to call it a day.

We've made about eighty dollars, all told.

I sold a painting to someone I already knew.

Bess sold a few rocks, but considering how most of them cost just a couple of dollars, and they're beautifully painted, she should have cleaned up; which at least means it wasn't us.

It was them.

*: Resembling Tristan, whom my wife knows at work.