Seven Years of Art Festivals

My first seven years of selling at art festivals were transformative. I realized I could paint for a living, and the rising demand for my paintings allowed me to paint more and more, giving me the opportunity to hone my skills and develop the tenets of Open Impressionism.

Where It All Began

The year was 2006. I was twenty-five years old, living in Vegas and rock climbing in Red Rock Canyon. I didn’t think I could make a living as an artist. I just knew I wanted to paint, and I made the decision to start painting one painting each week. After a year of painting, I heard about an art show at a local synagogue, and I showed up with my fifteen finest paintings, all inspired by local scenery I had climbed.

I didn’t sell a single painting, and I believe I only talked to two people who walked in during the show. However, a fellow artist there told me about the Boulder City Art Festival that was starting in a few weeks. I sent in a late application...and a few days later got a response: I sent in my booth fee, and I was in!

Driving up in my bright orange 1970 Chevy pickup truck, artwork loaded in the back and armed with several hundred dollars’ worth of metal grid wall paneling and a pop-up tent, I set up my first art festival, knowing nothing of what to expect. My work was smaller then; my largest painting measured 24 x 36 inches. I sold several paintings to one person during the show at the rare price of $500 apiece! I was just happy someone was willing to pay me for my paintings! I also met a young couple who had purchased a few paintings from the Valley of Fire State Park visitor’s center, where I had some artwork on display. I was in heaven: I now had TWO collectors!

That was my first taste of art festivals, and I was hooked.

Art Festival Stories

In 2007, I participated in four art festivals, upgrading from my old pickup truck to borrowing my mom’s minivan, hauling the seats out of the back each time I did a show. By 2010, I was traveling further to go to festivals, and I bought my own used Ford 350 van (bright yellow this time). The van had 100,000 miles on it, and I put another 100,000 miles on it before I sold it a few years later. This van allowed me the space I needed to upgrade from gridwall to ProPanels (the black panels I use now.)

Selling paintings at festivals isn't always a happy weekend in the park. Aside from difficult set up conditions, snide comments from passersby, rickety ladders, and setting up at 5 AM in the pitch black on frozen ground, there is the single greatest enemy to all festival artists, the enemy we all dread and whisper about in hushed voices—The Weather.

Rumors spread like wildfire through the artist festival network at the slightest hint of winds over 20 mph, as we all madly check AccuWeather for hourly updates and debate on wind direction and cloud formations. Facing sudden, unexpected winds blowing 140 mph through Palm Springs, with Texas tornadoes and monsoon season, we protect our work the best we can with hundreds of pounds of weights, cross-braces, dog ties, rebar pounded three feet into the ground, sandbags, concrete-filled PVC pipe, ratchets, and rope.

The rain is the milder enemy, easily confronted with a vinyl tent with roll-down sides, but rain fills us with trepidation because it scares away the art festival visitors. (I remember once sitting by myself for six hours in my tent in Palm Springs, with the front flap half-open as rain thundered down around me all day long, the only artist “open” in the show, hoping for a customer to return who said they would come by the next day.)

But a festival artist’s worst fear is The Wind.

Every artist I know has stories of canopies suddenly blowing twenty feet in the air, of human bodies being lifted off their feet as they fought to keep their tents on the ground, of ProPanels careening through the air and landing in palm trees.

The worst wind storm I ever experienced was in Palm Springs, spring 2012: every single tree in the park was torn up by the roots (one tree fell on a van parked two feet away from me, where I was crouched trying to hide from all the blowing glass)--trailers blew over, ProPanels did indeed fly through the air, and every single pop-up tent was destroyed. I remember that was time I ever painted live at a festival. The oil painting I had been working on flew off its easel in the sudden wind and splattered all over my neighbor’s booth (she was a leather worker, and all her pieces were destroyed.) When I saw her later, with my most contrite look on my face, she told me she couldn’t have been happier, because she had taken that opportunity to step away from leatherwork and into abstract resin painting, and she has been killing it at art festivals ever since.

Side note: that live demo painting was a painting of Canyon de Chelly, and the red sand that covered the surface from the wind ended up integrated into the finished piece!

The next day, when a few of us die-hard artists struggled our wind-bent and dusty gear back out of our vans to set up again on Sunday (sans our tents), we saw that only one tent was still standing after the windstorm the day before, and that was a Showoff canopy. Although the artist's entire collection of pottery had been blown away and destroyed, his tent managed to remain standing (granted, he had lowered the legs as low as they would go and tied his tent to a streetlight), but his tent outlasted all of our weak popups. Needless to say, I bought my own Showoff tent a week later (and I now own six of them!)

There are other ways to outlast the wind, even if you don't have a two-thousand-dollar tent or a handy streetlight nearby. One artist told me in confidence, his voice low behind his hand, that he always carries a battery-powered hammer drill with him, and when the wind picks up, he bolts his canopy directly into the pavement.

Wind and weather notwithstanding, I still love doing art festivals to this day. In 2013 (seven years after my first show), I did thirty art festivals in one year, traveling all across the Western states and painting madly in between shows to have enough work to hang and replace the pieces I had sold at the last show. Sometimes I would spend weeks on the road, living out of my van and going to National Parks for painting inspiration in between festivals.

Shortly after that epic year of art festivals, I opened my own brick and mortar gallery, The Erin Hanson Gallery. I must say, it was nice knowing I would never get rained on or blown down while trying to sell a painting.

Now, almost twenty years later, I can look back fondly at my festival adventures, knowing that every one of them led me to where I am today. Those early years laid the foundation for my career and instilled a deep appreciation for the art community's camaraderie and creativity. For any artist beginning their journey, there is no greater teacher than the art festival circuit.

Learn about upcoming exhibitions (one of which is at a festival!) here.