The People Who Become Part of the Show

There’s a moment when an art show stops feeling like a place you travel to for a weekend and starts feeling like a place you return to.

I realized at Rittenhouse this year that it isn’t really the place that creates that feeling. It’s the people.

I’ve done the show several times now, and each year there are more familiar faces. Artists I’ve gotten to know. People from the organization who remember me and whom I remember. Conversations that pick up from the last show as though not that much time has passed.

And increasingly, other parts of my life seem to find their way into the weekend, too.

My best friend from college, Anita, joined me for the second year in a row. We ran into Jeanne, one of the Rittenhouse volunteers I’ve gotten to know. There was Joven, a security guard I met at the June show and was so happy to see again. My Provincetown Theater world somehow showed up in Philadelphia, too, when friends who have a place there came to see me.

Then there was Jeff. I met him in June when he noticed the shirts I had made from my artwork. He loved them, bought one, and this time came back to visit me wearing it. There is something wonderfully strange about seeing an idea that began in my studio, became an encaustic painting, then became a T-shirt, walking back into my booth on someone I met months earlier.

I also connected with a young man who works with COLAGE and comes to Provincetown each summer to work with young people from LGBTQ families. Another completely unexpected connection between two different parts of my world.

These are the things I never anticipated when I started doing art shows.

Of course, I go to the show to sell my work. And this was a particularly gratifying Rittenhouse for that. I watched people respond to some of the work I’ve been most excited about making. Patterned Threads continues to connect with people, as do the larger Radiant Circles pieces. That’s enormously validating when so much of the experimentation happens alone in the studio.

But even the sales became stories about people.

One woman stopped in and introduced herself as a board member of an art festival in Ocala, Florida. We talked. She left. Later, she came back and bought a piece.

A couple from Long Island fell in love with Radiant Grid. By the following morning, I had pictures from them showing me where they had hung it in their home. Amazing!

Being an artist can be pretty solitary. I spend an enormous amount of time alone in the studio, working through ideas, trying something, changing it and sometimes wondering whether anyone else will see what I see in it.

Then for a few days I put up four black walls in the middle of a city and all these people pass through them.

Some stay for five minutes. Some want to understand how the work is made. Some buy something. Some come back months later. Some come back the next year. And somewhere along the way, people who entered my life through completely different doors wind up standing together in the same little booth.

By the end of the weekend, I’m tired. My feet hurt. I’ve probably explained encaustic painting a few hundred times.

But I also leave with something I didn’t arrive with.

I’ve seen the work through other people’s eyes. I’ve learned a little more about what is connecting. I’ve spent time with old friends and made new ones. And several pieces that began alone with me in the studio are now starting lives in someone else’s home.

Maybe that’s what I love most about returning to Rittenhouse.

I know I’ll bring the art. I just never quite know who else will show up.