Hi friends, I know it’s been awhile (again), but I’m still here. While my online presence was lackluster at best, I’ve been making art and doing markets as usual, albeit in a more challenging environment. Put plainly, it’s been a weird year for markets. Certain ones I thought were sure bets in the past were not this year, and it’s been a little difficult to gauge a couple of the new markets I tried due to unusual factors — extreme heat, wildfire smoke, temporary new location due to construction, etc. Fairy Tree Studios is basically breaking even for the year right now, though I hope and expect to move more into the black with holiday market season coming up. Even so, the dream of making a living solely from my art feels further away than it did a year ago.
Meanwhile I’ve been promoted twice at the library in the last two years, and now make more money there than I need, quite frankly, even with the price of literally everything increasing. If I was open to interpreting this all as some kind of sign from the Universe, I would say it’s telling me to hang up the art business and stick to librarianship.
I don’t believe that, though. I’m not saying I’m not open to the idea of the Universe nudging me in certain directions, but given what I get out of Fairy Tree Studios — even this sort of truncated version I’m maintaining right now — I can’t imagine eliminating it from my life. This last weekend I had a market in a park in downtown Champaign; I made about 25% less than last year, and just under half what I made there in 2024. But the number of people I got to stand and chat with — friends from work, repeat customers who told me about how they had something of mine hanging on their walls or needed more pocket journals to give to their gardener friends, or folks who struck up a conversation based on the subject of one of my paintings — all of that still made for a really great day. My husband and I have joked about how a couple of our townie friends seem to know everyone, and that day I kind of felt like I did too. I have a hard time making new friends, and don’t have a ton of them here in CU even after being here for 10 years, but this made me feel like I was maybe doing better than I thought.
It still sucks to be making less when I feel like FTS should be growing, but it’s always been about more than the money to me. (That’s part of the reason I’m so much less active online — I don’t have the personality to build “my audience” virtually and I feel like I get less out of the same effort.) Now that I’m full time at the library I have a lot less bandwidth to make art and do all the business things, but it’s still happening. As someone somewhere has probably said, progress is slow, but it’s still progress.
Anyway, I felt like it was probably time to remind you all that I still exist, and to share a couple things that I’ve painted lately. I have more ideas than I have time to execute, but I guess that’s better than the opposite? Work is still getting done, and it’s work I’m proud of, so if I’m going to take anything as a sign, I guess that would be it.
Fairy Tree Studios 