Letting Go

Here's a photo I took this evening at Spanish Village. We had our annual Open House, the third Saturday of July. All the studios stay open until 9:00 p.m. and most of them have refreshments of one kind or another. However, over the years, whenever we have a Silent Auction, I help set it up and man the booth. You can see all those clipboards on the table in front of me. They have bid sheets on them.

Artists in the Village donate their artwork and I make labels on the computer for each piece, including the name of the artist, the name of the piece if there is one, the medium, the opening bid, and in which studio you can find more work by that artist. I also make the bid sheets which include most of the same information and have lines where bidders can write in their bids. Of course, the highest bid gets the piece. You have to be present when the bidding closes.

Bidders have until a given time to write down their name and their bid. It's open bidding, so you can see if someone has out bid you, and you have a chance to increase yours. When it gets close to the cutoff time for the bids, sometimes people pass the clipboards back and forth until the President calls time. The money collected from the bidders goes to help with the expenses of Spanish Village.

It took me about four hours to do all the paperwork for the auction. Then I spent the evening sitting at the table in the booth. Normally I wouldn't want to do that, but I was glad I did this time. I had decided earlier in the day to donate one of my etched copper bracelets be sold in the auction. If an artist donates a piece and it doesn't sell, it goes back to the artist. I decided that I wanted to see how my piece would be received and that I'd be perfectly happy to get it back if it didn't sell. But it did sell. When the first person wrote down a bid, I knew it was no longer mine.

The interesting thing about the experience was that three different people bid on it. A fourth person came up and asked me if I knew who the artist was and where she was located. It was nice to get positive feedback like that without having to specifically ask for it. I feel a certain loss of the bracelet, but I'm happy three people liked it enough to buy it. And I know of course that I will be able to make more. In fact, I have two more right now that I haven't put the rivets in.

Originally, I chose printmaking and specifically etching as a medium because prints are usually printed in editions of more than one. That means if I have an etching or relief print that I like, I can keep one for myself and print at least one more for someone else. The etched bracelets are a little different in that each one is a portion of a freehand drawing. However, I do have a recognizeable drawing style that will carry over from one bracelet to the next. And I think the bracelets are a good way to give many people an opportunity to enjoy my drawings which otherwise languish in sketchbooks on my shelves.