An Artist's Blog

An Exciting New Year Begins

2009-01-09T19:25:00.004-07:00

It is an unusual winter here in the Tetons. A series of strong winter storms has battered our corner of the world for the past month. Over 200" of snow has fallen so far this winter in our mountains, which is why we live here; skiers that we are. Unfortunately this winter's storms have created an unusually unstable snowpack in the mountains and avalanches have caused much concern and sadly have taken lives. Above is a picture of an on-mountain restaurant damaged by an avalanche at the nearby Jackson Hole Ski Resort. Perhaps not what one usually finds on an artists website, but it is part of our unique world.

We're sure 2009 will be unusual in other ways. Our nation faces huge challenges and all businesses will have to be creative to thrive. There is much justifiable worry and fear and the art world is not going to be immune from financial setbacks. Those of us who have been in this world for a couple of decades have lived through recessions and stock market crashes and somehow survived. We expect to again. Maybe we're just dumb, or foolish, but we plan on forging ahead, making better garments than we ever have, confident that somewhere out there our customers are also surviving and looking to bring a little joy into their lives with an artful and warm coat or jacket.

Home Again

2008-12-16T05:45:00.007-07:00

We returned home to Driggs last week after our final show of the year in Chicago. It really soothes the soul to be back in our little snow covered valley and gaze again on the magnificent Teton Range. The very first thing we did the minute we arrived home was grab our skis and enjoy a few late afternoon runs. After weeks of no days off, these couple of hours in the sun , breathing the fresh mountain air and using long neglected muscles were heavenly and very rejuvenating.

Here's an early winter view of the Tetons with the higher peaks cloud shrouded.

Late fall is our most hectic time of the year as customers wisely get more serious about dressing for winter. Our sales of garments and hats accelerate, orders pile up and the busier shows stress our inventory. We try our very best to get out as many orders as we can to customers who would like them before Christmas, but we just don't have enough elves, and I guess our suppliers don't either since shipments of leather to us have been slower than usual this fall.

In spite of the dire economic news we are all bombarded with these days, we found attendance at our last shows in Marlborough, MA. outside Boston and in Chicago was robust. Some potential customers passed on buying, citing economic worries, but we came home very pleased with this trip and excited to have further confirmation that our designs are very appealing in the urban markets as well as in our traditional resort markets.In Chicago one of our favorite customers came to visit us, happily wearing a coat we made for her two years ago.

What is Wearable Art?

2008-11-13T22:01:00.003-07:00

I'll bet there are many answers to "what is wearable art?"

Yesterday I discover an article from a couple of years ago in the LA Times, by Booth Moore, that took a stab at it.
"The definition is difficult to pin down, but generally wearable art is “artist-made clothing constructed from artist-made textiles,” according to (Legion of Honor museam) curator Melissa Leventon. “A lot of wearable artists were trained in fine art and weren’t interested in learning how to be fashion designers,” she said. “They were interested in beating their way into the art world with clothing.” The genre is also characterized by low-level production and capitalization, she said. “Wearable artists are not backed by [luxury fashion conglomerate] Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. They work within a cottage-industry model.”

Maybe. I don't see too many artists making their own textiles these days, but I agree with the low-level production and capitalization/cottage-industry description.
I was truly surprised to read that the movement began with the 1960's hippies. (Horay for my generation!) I would have thought it would be centuries old.

An interesting article. Check it out.

Morristown, NJ

2008-10-26T21:51:00.004-06:00

Just across the road from the National Guard Armory, where we participated in our second craft show of our trip to the East, the sugar maples were blazing. Living in Idaho, we don't see the flaming oranges and reds the wonderful maple trees show off with on the East Coast, and we miss them. Our aspens are certainly beautiful in their gorgeous golds, but to us who grew up in New York, maples are the kings of the fall foliage show.

With the stock market in apparent free fall, we were skeptical about the potential for having a successful show so close to the epicenter of financial calamity, and we did find people who loved our coats, but who just couldn't dare to spend the money this year. But, unbelievably, we had some customers who bought two coats! Wonders never cease. Despite a modest turn out for the show, we ended up very pleased with our trip to New Jersey. We made new friends, were treated to awesome fall colors and had dinner with one of Rita's cousins who we hadn't seen in almost twenty years.

I've never gone to a high school or college class reunion, but returning to the New York area to do a show after an almost twenty year's absence produced what I imagine is a similar "getting old" fast feeling. There were probably about a dozen or so artists exhibiting there I remember from years ago. I was glad to see they had grown as artists and were producing even more wonderful works than they had before. I was glad they were still doing what they love. I wasn't so glad to see them aging though.

On a brighter note, we also saw lots of artists who appear to be in their twenties or thirties! At times at these shows, we feel like there isn't a new crop of artists coming along to replace our generation, but the Morristown show made us optimistic that this nomadic lifestyle of traveling artists continues to have appeal emerging artists. Yea!

Paradise City Northampton Massachusetts

2008-10-26T19:35:00.006-06:00

Well, that was a long drive! All the way from Driggs, ID to Davenport , NY in three long days. Twenty-five hundred miles. Thank goodness for books on tape to make the long hours looking at the vast farmlands of center of the US pass quickly. After arriving in Davenport late Wednesday night, we enjoyed a day of rest and visiting with Rita's dad, before driving the last 3-1/2 hours to Northampton and setting up for the show there.

Here's Rita working with some early Saturday morning customers. We haven't appeared in a show on the East coast since the early 1990's so we weren't sure how what we are making these days would be received by the show visitors. Happily, the long trip proved worthwhile with many people liking and buying our work. For some reason, people at this event were especially drawn to our feathery soft Tibetan Lamb scarves. They are a perennial favorite everywhere we go, but in Northampton we found homes for a record number of them. Warm shearling coats were very much in demand as well.

The show was held on Columbus Day Weekend and Northampton was packed with people from New York and Boston enjoying the peak fall foliage as well as this terrific show. The Paradise City shows were developed after we moved to Idaho so we had never participated in any of them. Even though the tough economy has reduced sales by exhibitors at arts and crafts shows, Paradise City's excellent marketing efforts certainly brought out the public, whether they were coming to buy or just enjoy looking at all the high quality offerings. We felt this show had the over all highest quality of exhibits and wares of any show we have been at in many years.

Finding a not too crowded place to eat dinner after the show each night was something of a challenge, but Northampton had dozens of eateries, so we just looked for the shortest wait times. A highlight was the discovery of an incredibly reasonably priced bakery that had delicious deserts for us chocoholics. And, we saw our first ever piano playing busker playing an upright piano on a sidewalk under a streetlight.

Sorry Sedona and Wall Street fall out

2008-10-04T07:29:00.003-06:00

Today we were supposed to be in Sedona, AZ. participating in its fine art show. An attention lapse while stepping off some scaffolding last week cost Fred a trip to the doctor and some pretty strong drugs making the trip to Sedona unrealistic. We find Sedona a beautiful spot and an interesting place to visit, so it is sad to not be there.

Checking the Sedona weather forecast for the weekend and seeing rain and wind as highly probable, maybe we should not lament not being in the art show there too much, doing art shows in storms are just so much fun!

Our weekend will not be a weekend off. We have too much still to sew up before leaving on Monday for our cross country drive to Northampton, MA for the Paradise City show there next weekend.

We have to admit that the nation's economic woes are a real concern. Will attendance at art shows be lower than normal. Will attendees be cutting back on their purchasing, especially shows located closer to New York City, the epicenter of the financial problems? It is a long drive to Massachusetts to find out. Fortunately this trip also gives us the opportunity to visit Rita's dad in Upstate New York, and we are scheduled for another show in Morristown, NJ the following weekend, so between the two shows we are hopeful that our trip will prove worthwhile.

On a related note, the Jackson Hole Film Institute, the sponsor of the Jackson Hole Film Festival has closed its doors, a victum of the withdrawl of funding by people who formerly made a good living on Wall Street. Wall Street's demise even reaches deep into artistic life of the Rocky Mountains.

Colorado Art Fairs Trip

2008-09-10T07:01:00.008-06:00

One of the reasons we're still acting like kids (refusing to grow up and get real jobs) and persisting in doing this crazy business is the freedom it offers to travel to interesting places. Many of our friends have jobs that allow them to travel, but only from one crowded city to another crowded city or suburb. For the past couple of weeks we've exercised our business travel muscles by hanging out around Colorado's mountains so we could sandwich a little vacation time in between show dates.

We did a Labor Day Weekend art fair in colorful Breckenridge. Summit County, home of Breckenridge probably has too many homes, shopping plazas and other downsides of too many people trying to claim some ownership in a high mountain environment, but there is no denying that Breckenridge's historic old main street, as packed with people and touristy shops and restaurants as it is, is a delight to wander around and people watch. In addition to the colorfully painted old Victorian era buildings that line main street, we love the flower festooned street gardens, window boxes and hanging planters that are everywhere adding even more color and gaiety to the street scene. Unlike our home town of Driggs's unfortunately drab, treeless main street, Breck isn't shy about planting lots of aspens and spruces and other native species all along the median between the curb and the sidewalks bringing the atmosphere of the mountains right into the heart of the town. These trees not only offer eye pleasing beauty, but provide shade and noise quieting as well. A very cool town, well worth visiting more than once.
An attractive flower garden in front of a Main Street business.

With three days to enjoy between shows, we went deeper into the Colorado mountains to finally do a little exploring via our favorite mode of transportation; our feet. We've been too busy with the business and building our new house and studio this year to take time to take even one hike in our glorious home Teton mountain range, so we risked sore muscles to jump at the chance to climb Colorado's highest mountain (and the second highest mountain in the lower 48 states); Mt Elbert which tops out at 14,440 feet. We had a stunning day to make our way to the top, almost cloudless blue skies and hardly a breeze. Here we are, on top of Mt. Elbert, 14440 feet above sea level.

The next day we "discovered" a very long and winding dirt road that followed the route of the original train route up through a narrow canyon to connect the gold mining towns of Cripple Creek and Victor to the outside world. We had no idea what an amazing road we were embarking on when saw it as a narrow gray line on the map. Narrow, dusty, mostly single lane, winding along cliff edges and through narrow old railroad tunnels, and going on endlessly, but offering gorgeous views and interesting historical information markers, it turned out to be a surprise highlight of our trip. Victor looks like a small, sort of dirty, industrial mining town high on ridge and Cripple Creek was a surprise of an all together different breed. It at first looked like a restored tourist type old mining town with a surprising surplus of parking lots. Once we hit the sidewalks the truth became clear, the restored street side facades of the old buildings covered up large casinos that filled all the buildings on either side of the central business district. Having no interest in gambling, we were not aware that Colorado had its own little Las Vegas tucked away high in its mountains with hourly bus service down to the cities along the Front Range.

Our Colorado excursion ended with a two day show in Castle Rock, a very suburban community located about halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. After a somewhat sparsely attend show in Breckenridge, it was nice to see good sized crowds attending the Castle Rock show. In addition to an up tick in business, the jurors at the Castle Rock saw fit to award us with another Best in Show award, an honor we always appreciate.
Receiving our Best in Show ribbon.

Bluebird Days in Jackson Hole

2008-08-18T08:10:00.003-06:00

Here's Rita helping a customer a the Jackson Art Association Art Fair this weekend.

With a lot of our product line devoted to warm clothing for winter, it is difficult to interest people in our things in the summer. Regrettably, in the Rockies where we live, summer time is the only time high quality art fairs are held, so we have to grin and bare it and try our best to help people remember that summer is transitory and winter will soon be back-- and that it lasts longer in this part of the world than summer does. Frankly, that is a very hard sell when it is ninety degrees in the shade. The last thing a sane person wants to do is try on a fabulously warm winter coat.

With the weather providing spectacularly blue and cloudless skies, and with temperatures only in the seventies, we had high hopes for an unusually successful summer show in Jackson, Wyoming this past weekend. It just goes to show...not much in life can be counted on to do what you expect.

Maybe if it had snowed the number of people interested in warm clothing might have been higher, but it seems the economic woes of the nation have crept into very affluent Jackson Hole now too. We were fortunate enough to find old and new customers enough to make the show a success for us, just not the type of success we had hoped for considering the gorgeous cool weather. However, many of our fellow artists suffered great disappointments. An extremely gifted raku sculptor, who traveled all the way from Michigan, was exhibiting next to us. He failed to make a sale all weekend and he wasn't alone. Another artist who makes beautiful dulcimers and who has exhibited in Jackson for many years suffered a similar fate. Hat designers, weavers, jewelers, painters, all friends of ours, and virtually all left for home disappointed by sales that were far below normal. It appears that the discretionary income that supports the arts may be shrinking.

But, is the size of the financial trouble mere perception, or is it reality? We had a lady decline to purchase something that was a couple of hundred dollars, saying she just couldn't afford it. She said that after she had told us she has a home in Washington, DC and she also has a second home in Jackson. It's hard to believe anyone who can afford a multi-million dollar second home in Jackson can't afford to spent a couple of hundred dollars at an art fair. Perhaps perception can be reality.

Dramatically reduced sales and what appeared to be a fall off in attendance was a hard reality for many of our fellow artists. With so many artists striving to make a difficult and precarious living, we sincerely hope this show was an aberration.

We have ten days to spend at home now. Fred will be putting a new roof on the house some of those days. A slippery metal roof, so he won't have to climb up on the roof in the winter anymore to shovel off the deep snow. We'll try to get caught up on our custom orders and maybe make some new hat and handbag designs become reality instead of just potentially good ideas floating around in our little gray cells.

Sun Valley

2008-08-11T09:41:00.003-06:00

After years of hearing about a fabulous art show in Sun Valley, we finally made the pleasant trip to Sun Valley to participate this past weekend in this year's show. Artists have told us about all the Hollywood people summering in Sun Valley that come to the show and how wonderful sales are at this show, so we went hoping for a fun weekend spiced up with a little celebrity sighting.

We did see stars, but only the celestial ones on the clear cool nights. When the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, which puts on this annual art show, had to move the show's location from a site next to the Sun Valley Resort's Lodge to park in downtown Ketchum (only about a mile away), it seems they lost the loyal following of celebrities and other guests staying at the posh lodge. Oh well, our regular customer's are the true stars in our life.

As always we met some wonderful people and found good homes for many of our creations. We also found time to soak in a delightful natural hot spring a few miles up the road from Sun Valley. We could have gone to a free symphony concert that night at the new $30 million concert venue (built on the site where the art show used to be held), but we were too tired and thought a hot spring soak would be more our speed that night.

Maybe it is because summer is past it's prime, but we noticed a clear up tick in interest in our shearling garments at this show, as opposed to our leather garments at previous shows. Perhaps it was due to evening temperatures in the low 40's? We just hope that anyone interested in a new shearling coat for this winter plans ahead and places their order early so we have time to make what they want. With the rising costs of shipping leathers and skins from Europe to the U.S., our suppliers in NYC are not willing to fly in supplies like they used to, so delivery times are getting slower.

A Trade Secret

2008-08-06T07:12:00.007-06:00

Here's Rita with a happy new coat owner!

We were in Park City, UT for the Kimball Art Center's really big Festival of the Arts last weekend. This show is the most amazing show we do all year, from a sponsoring organization's logistics point of view. Several blocks of Main Street (the heart of old Park City) are blocked off to traffic for three days, most alleys and side streets are fenced off to control admission to the festival, parking for thousands of cars in out-lying lots is secured and dozens of buses run on time at mere five minute intervals to transport the 40-50,000 festival visitors to and from Main Street. Police and hundreds of volunteers keep the city and festival running with very few glitches over the long weekend. We're reminded of a major military operation.

This year the weather was spectacular summer sunshine and NO RAIN! We saw many happy customer from previous years and made new friends and customers to look forward to seeing again next year.

One old friend stopped who by to say hello is the vice-president of Overland Sheepskins and Leather, a national retailer of men's and women's shearling and leather garments with 13 stores from Vermont to California. We had been noticing that Overland, like most other shearling and leather stores, has been carrying ever higher percentages of non-American made products. Our friend informed us that they were lately finding that their customers were preferring to buy the American made goods they still carried, over the cheaper imports, so they were trying to shift their inventory to reflect this trend. Music to our ears.

He also told us that he was very frustrated with his foreign leather manufactures. It seems that they are constantly trying to save money by trimming their pattern pieces smaller and smaller to save on material costs. This obviously changes the sizes and the fit of the garments they send him- much to his consternation.

So, if you ever have wondered why something you bought fits "funny", or if you had to go up a size, it might merely be a "trade secret" of higher profits for the off-shore manufacturer.

We arrived home at 2:30 a.m. on Monday morning, and will be leaving at 4:00 a.m. Thursday morning for our next show in Sun Valley, so we're really cramped for time to restock and get ready. Days off? What are those?

Here's Rita assisting more clients in Park City.

Jackson Hole Art Fest

2008-07-27T20:48:00.003-06:00

Another weekend, another art show for us. We're getting back into the rhythm of doing shows after a few month lay off.

Doesn't this sound like fun? Drive one to forty hours to get to the show, depending on where it is. Work two to four hours setting up for the show, then staff the booth for eight or more hours a day during the show. Spend about two hours packing up and taking the booth down before driving another one to forty hours home or to the next show. Pay the sales tax, order materials to make new stock and fill customer orders, raid the inventory to restock , or work ten to fourteen hours a day in the studio to make replacement stock in time for departure to next show. Remember to feed the cats, water and weed the veggie garden, harvest the ripe veggies (Rita is blanching spinach as Fred types this post), mow the lawn- no it can wait- pay bills which can't wait, try to squeeze in a daily bike ride and maybe work on bringing a new design idea to life to try out at the next show. Repeat every week for the next four weeks. Well, it sure looks like work on our new house and studio will have to wait until we get a couple of weeks off between shows at the end of August.

Thankfully, this weekend's show was only an hour away in Teton Village, Wyoming. This was a "try out" show for us because it is a small show (under 50 artists) and it comes between two other shows we do in nearby Jackson each summer, so we worried about saturating the market, but with the price of gas so dear this year, we thought it would be a good year to try out the show. We hoped we would tap into a different clientel, more vacationers, than the Jackson residents we normally see at the Jackson Shows.

Well, it turned out we mostly met more nice Jackson residents instead of vacationers. So we ended up expanding or Jackson customer base more, although we met many nice out of town folks as well.

Serendipitously, one vacationer was a person who had purchased a hat from us a couple of years ago in Portland, OR. On a trip to Paris, she lost it and had been mourning its loss ever since. On Saturday she had just come down from an adventure in the mountains and stopped by the art show on a whim and found us there. She now has a new hat which she will never lose! What a joy it is to us to make someone so happy with one of our creations.

A great resource

2008-07-25T09:10:00.001-06:00

This photo shows a small portion of our leather color palette. We get leathers from around the globe, with the majority of our leathers coming from suppliers located in New York City. Living in the wilds of the Tetons, New York isn't exactly convenient, so we rely on phone contacts. For several years we have been working with a nice man at one of New York's largest leather brokerage houses, but we've always had communication difficulties with him due to his thick Spanish accent.

One of the problems with phone conversations is you don't know what other things are going on around the person on the other end of the line. For the past year, dealing with this individual has been increasingly difficult and frustrating, beyond the language problem. Where he used to be very helpful, lately he has been curt and the level of information about what he has available has declined. He'd frequently say, "I'm too busy, call me back." For the last few months, when it came time to call him to order or to request information, we'd feel like drawing straws to see who would get the onerous task of dealing with him this time.

After we failed to get timely information on availability of leather for a special order garment for a customer Fred said, "enough!" and wrote a letter to the owner of the business explaining our difficulties

Yesterday the owner called Fred and apologized for the drop off in service and instructed us to send our orders and information requests directly to him so he'd be able to make sure our account was handled properly. He explained that the man we had been dealing with was really over-worked and had too much on his plate all the time, but he was working on trying to correct the problem.

All of a sudden, leathers that we had been told they didn't have in stock are on a UPS truck heading for our studio. The squeaky wheel...

It is nice to know that our business is valued by the owner and that he is willing to personally take care of what is surely a small account to him compared to the large fashion houses he also supplies. It is no wonder that he offers the largest selection of quality leathers of any of our suppliers. That his business is growing in spite of the huge transportation cost increases and the declining value of the dollar (versus the Euro) which are creating pricing problems for him, and for anyone importing outstanding Spanish and Italian leathers, is a tribute to his business savvy. Being a small business, we like to see good people succeed in business when they try hard. We thank him for his courtesy and for making our business more valuable to our customers because we continue to have good access to the world's finest leathers.

Art Fair in Jackson

2008-07-21T09:13:00.000-06:00

7/20/08

The past week was every bit as hectic and chaotic as we feared it would be, but we survived it. We even managed to create another new jacket which is drew rave reviews from customers at our first show.

Mother Nature has been kind to Jackson Hole this weekend, offering up mild temperatures, sunny skies and gentle breezes, all of which make doing an outdoor art show a pleasure. Dealing with downpours, violent winds, or sweltering temperatures- all common occurrences in the life of an artist exhibiting in summer outdoor shows- would drive saner people into another line of work.

In spite of the spectacular weather, attendance at the Jackson Art Association’s July art show remained “light,” in the estimation of those of us familiar with dynamics of art shows. However, there is a wonderful core of art supporters in Jackson who come every year and who do support the artists, making the show a successful one for most exhibitors. Apparently high gas prices were not sufficient discouragement to keep artists from traveling from as far away as Georgia, Florida and Delaware to attend the show.

We have a new look to our booth this year. We hope it shows off our clothing better while allowing us to work more pleasurably with our clients as we measure them and discuss customizing options of their orders.

During a break from working in our booth, Fred was lucky enough to drop by the entertainment tent and catch a few numbers performed by the Jackson 6, a local Dixieland jazz ensemble. They are a tight bunch who played with verve and the joyful spirit Dixieland needs to sound its best. Fred looks forward to catching a whole performance by them in the future.

For dinner after the show yesterday we drop by Teton Thai, a highly recommended small eatery favored by locals for great food at reasonable prices. The place has about a dozen outdoor tables on a deck at the end of a dead-end pedestrian shopping walkway. The émigré Thai staff works wonders in its crowded kitchen while the wait staff of appropriately scruffy mountain jocks serves tired climbers back in town from a day in the mountains, young workers relaxing after a long day in the shops or construction sites in Jackson and a few tourist families with kids in tow. Yogi, the world’s most relaxed golden retriever, lays in the shade of an unused table keeping a sleepy eye on the staff and his other eye out for dog loving kids. The only sour note was the choice of music playing while a deejay was setting up for his stint. The twenty some-things probably liked it. We highly recommend the Laab Salad and the Pad Thai.

Almost Show Time

2008-07-21T08:45:00.000-06:00

7/11/08

A week from today our “business year” for 2008 officially starts when we appear at our first art show of the year. This one is a local one, just an hour away in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The week until the show will be HECTIC!

Even though it has been more than seven months since our last show, we are still short of inventory for many items we want to bring so there is the big push to make more stock, PLUS, we have to find all the paraphernalia needed to set up an attractive and storm proof booth. Rocky Mountain thunderstorms can demolish lesser booths and wipe out months of production and thousands of dollars of work in a few minutes. We’re also hoping to find time to make some needed improvements to our booth and the way we display things in it.

Being artists, we’re still having fun creating new designs, so choosing whether to put more time into them or into older more proven sellers is a bit of guess work and usually ends up being just more long hours as we try to do both.

Here’s a very cue new idea we just finished yesterday. The very attractive printed leather on the front is something we picked up in New York a few years ago and we just never found the right use for it- until yesterday! Its funny how things that look so obvious once discovered can remain hidden for so long.

Now that our son Evan is back from his Alaska adventure trip, he’s working on our new website and we want to work closely with him to get it done by show time next week too.

Welcome

2008-07-21T08:33:00.000-06:00

7/10/08

We realize most people will have little in what is written here, but for those who are curious of what life is like for working fiber artists we plan to provide some insight into our creative process, the “production” of our garments, and life on the road marketing our creations at fine art shows. Our life and our little business are far from ordinary, but some how it works and suits us.

God knows how you have stumbled upon this blog, but welcome!