moments

I'm not sure where the time goes. There was a time when I felt compelled to blog almost every day and if I didn't it nagged at me. I do blog in my head a lot!

I had a sweet moment with some art show friends at my last show and I blogged in my head about it which made me think I needed to get back to this. Because it helps me remember, even if nobody is reading me anymore.

So, before I forget, I am going to blog about some special moments from the past show season. To share them and to remember them.

I'll blog about those art show friends later. First I want to tell you about the heart lady I met at Colorscape Chenango. Since this is a blog about being an art gypsy, I'll start by telling you about Colorscape.

A friend has been talking about this show for a while and we decided to give it a go. She said no show treats you better. Intriguing. It is the weekend after Labor Day and our vacation reservations fell later in the month than usual, so we applied and got it. So glad we did. The little town of Norwich, New York was welcoming and apparently filled with art and music lovers because they came out in droves. We didn't make a ton of money, but the experience was so positive it didn't matter. This is why we will never be rich. We met so many wonderful people and my new work sold well.

Which brings me to the "Heart Lady".

This season we experimented with making prints of the collage and selling them just with a backing board, in a clearbag. It was a hit. At Colorscape, one lady spent a lot of time browsing them and I saw her sometimes tracing the outline with her finger. She was older, quiet, sweet smile. I had started to putter behind the tent when she came up with 8 prints. Eight! Well, OK then.

She asked me to hold them for her because she needed to go home and get her money. No problem. Except she didn't come back. With about an hour left in the show and a couple of the prints sold out, I started to put them back in the bin. I had lost one sale already and each print was a few gallons of gas for our cross country drive!

I had barely put the last one back when she showed up. I apologized for returning them and explained that I thought she had decided against them. Oh no she assured me, it just took her a while to get home and back. We went through the bins and retrieved the ones she wanted...and even added one..and she started to tell me  what she was looking for in them.

Some years before she had endured a tough time. Sounded like it was illness related. And she began to wonder what it was all about and she prayed on it and talked to friends about it and somehow, during that time, she asked God or the Universe or the angels to send her a sign and she looked down and there, on the grass, the first few flakes of snow had formed a heart. Not content to accept that, she continued to look for more signs and she began to see more hearts. She said she saw them everywhere once she really started to look. In piles of leaves, in the suds when washing dishes, clouds. She started to collect things with hearts in them. One night, when despair began to take her again, she said to her husband that it was folly, this quest for signs, and she walked out onto her porch. It was evening and a light snow was falling, big floating flakes and some of them fell softly onto the sleeve of her coat. She started to walk back in, brushing the snow from her coat when she looked down a saw it. One snowflake, a perfect heart. Now we all know snowflakes are not heart shaped and so does she. The analytical side of her understood that it was formed by the pattern of its melting.

Doesn't make it any less of a sign, she thought, and called her husband out to see it before it melted totally. Once you start looking, she told me, you see them everywhere.  Signs or hearts, I asked her. Same thing she said with a smile. Then she showed me how some of the shapes of my torn papers or the way some elements came together formed heart shapes. That's what she was tracing. The outlines of  hearts. Her signs.

I thought about her a lot after she left. Wondered about signs and portents and what brings comfort. We were both moved by her. She said once you start looking for hearts you see them everywhere, so I started to look. I looked in the grass, the sky, the trees. I walked the show and looked in other booths. Nothing. My signs may turn out to be a different thing and maybe I won't see them until I need them. But I am glad she sees them. And I'm glad I was able to put a few more in her life.