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Well, Naples National was certainly the big dog this past weekend, and even I looked forward to hearing how everyone made out (feel your pain, Jon; good work on your sales and post, Nels).

Not everyone could take a ride at the Naples merry-go-round, of course.  And for some of us, that meant taking the ride up I-95 to Stuart, for Howard Alan's 22nd installment of the Stuart Art Festival.

This is a quintessential old-style Alan show.  Street setup starting at 5 AM Saturday, with tents facing each other on narrow Osceola Street, which passes for the main drag in downtown Stuart--which, by the way,  has more narrow streets, blind alleys, and high-risk, death-defying traffic circles than anywhere I've ever traveled. 

Making sense of the weekend's sales was no less confusing:  I talked to probably 20 artists, and it was a mixed bag. One large-scale mixed-media artist from Delaware, with price points over $2K and a minimal number of small reproductions, and fresh off a Best in 2-D award from Barry Witt's February Bonita Springs show,  gathered lots of compliments but zeroed on the weekend.  But another large-scale 2-D artist made two huge sales on Saturday alone, making it his best show of his season.  "Pelican Steve," who like me had a prime spot just inside the show entrance, put it to good advantage and nearly sold out his wood sculptures.  Most folks I spoke with who had done this show frequently said their sales were at, slightly above, or slightly below, their take from the last two years.  So it seems like if you do this show consistently, you'll build a following, but that it won't necessarily make you rich.  Compared with Naples, for sure it was a smaller pie to share.

There was a LOT of photography at the show (I didn't count the artist list, but I'm betting shooters outnumbered jewelers at this one.)  Lots of wildlife and landscape photographers, including the estimable Mr. Steve Vaughn and Tim Kiusalass, who creates awe-inspiring large-scale, beautifully-framed landscapes and displays them in a beautifully designed booth.  Steve and Tim joined me for a great dinner on Saturday night where we swapped lies and neatly solved every burning issue in the art show business (email Steve for details on the forthcoming book). 

I had only nine sales all weekend, with a total take of about $1600, and I felt lucky indeed to eke that out.  Three sales were pretty big 'uns, including a custom order for a large canvas that accounted for half the weekend's take.  But the rest were all single-item $30 sales.

The show was well organized and ably run by the HAE staff.  And the crowds did come, as they usually do at an Alan show.  But it didn't seem like there was a lot of buying energy around.

The Treasure Coast area (which includes Hobe Sound and Jupiter) is pretty well saturated with shows, and it might be the time of year when buyer's fatigue is setting in. There are some beautiful, high income golf course and gated communities not far away from the show venue.  But I'm not sure they attended this show: Many of the locals I talked to over my three-day stay told me that they avoid downtown congestion and parking hassles. And many of the very nice folks who came through my booth were elderly retirees who'd lived in Stuart many years, not new-to-the-area homebuyers.  (My two largest sales, tellingly, were to seasonal snowbirds.)  

In addition, there was a discernible mixed vibe from the downtown merchants. Although the show definitely puts feet on the street, some merchants are unconvinced that they make their way from show to storefronts.  Alan mitigates this by having frequent breaks in the rows of tents to allow access to the shops and restaurants, but in an already-touchy downtown economy, some merchants fret about their regulars losing parking to the show patrons, having their signage blocked by tents and the sidewalk blocked by artist storage.  Accordingly, the show layout moved the tents forward into the street a couple of feet, so that artist storage is on the street-side of the curb, not on the sidewalks. That solves one problem, but creates another, making the already-narrow streets a bit tougher to navigate.  (It also makes it a good idea for artists to make sure they store their work off the ground in case it rains.  Which, during Saturday morning setup, it did--but luckily, not for long.) 

This show isn't nearly as expensive as a Coconut Grove (hotel rooms could be had for $75 a night), and the booth fee is at the lower end of Alan's shows.  But as gas rises toward $4 a gallon, the nearly 400-mile round trip blew the budget I'd laid out only two months earlier, when a gallon of gas was "only" $3.30.  All told I spent about $750 on the weekend, plus massive but futile tips to cute waitresses. So although Stuart definitely served as a "paycheck show," on the whole I'd rather have been in Naples, only 30 minutes' drive from my home.  

 I've got one more shot in Stuart: I'll be returning on March 24-25 for Stuart ArtsFest.  Sponsored by the Martin County Arts Council, it's located only a quarter-mile or so east of this week's affair.  It will be interesting to see how the two shows compare. 

Can't wrap up this post without sharing a pretty funny Saturday-morning slice o'life:   I had just finished up with a customer when I heard three women arguing behind me.  Wondering if they were upset with my neighbor, or with me,  I stepped back to see what the commotion was about.  Two women who ran the restaurant were berating the owner of the shop next door, gesturing and pointing at the wooden signboard the shop owner had placed in the street, complaining that it blocked access to their restaurant.  The shop owner's explanations weren't calming the situation, and the women continued yelling at her to move it.

Then, the lady saw a man walking past the sidewalk sign.  "Sir! Sir!," she said, and he stopped, startled.  "Did you have any trouble walking past this sign just now?" 

Nonplussed, he said, "Well, no, I didn't. "

The shop owner threw up her hands in triumph.  "Hah!!" she said.  "Didn't think so! THANK you, sir!"

The man, bewildered, stepped away and into the front door of the restaurant for breakfast.

She looked at the two restaurant owners, who were still barking at her, and gave them a tight-lipped smile.  "I'm just going to let you two shout among yourselves," she said, quietly.  "The sign stays!" 

And so it did.