Saturday Market Memories: Day One

The Salt Spring Saturday Market kicked off for another season this weekend and it's hard to believe that all three of us are going into our third year as vendors. That's Lorne, salesman extraordinaire, moi, and Tom. It was freezing as you can see by the look of Linda, below, but at least it wasn't raining.

The very best thing about the kick off of the market, (other than the fact that Lorne was finally shamed into purchasing a new handmade felted Funk hat) is meeting new people and talking to all the people you already know who drop by for a quick chat. It's as if someone opened the doors on the cabins like they were letting the cows out of the barn while screaming, "Don't let the door bump your bums on the way out."

They ramble down to Centennial Park and the festivities begin. The tents go up. Rob, Market Coordinator, gets the group organized. The jockeying for points-based positions begins. The wind kicks up. Displays are knocked over.  Things break. Sizing up takes place. Good are perused. Wallets are cracked open. Conversations ensue. Let the socializing and the networking (and in some instances), the bickering, begin.

It's a microcosm of the planet really. War and peace. Politics and religion. Beauty and bullshit. Creativity and connection. Friendship and revelry.

Here's a whirlwind summary of what I vaguely recall. I asked asked a few people how their winters had been. How is it possible that I never saw them for 6 months. Noticed who had tans which explained their invisibility. One word: Mexico.

Met a New Westminster city councillor named McEvoy. Told him my family had lived there for seven decades up until 1979. His wife bought three cards.

Sold a Telus Networking expert a card for his 90-year-old mother in Surrey. Got followed by Judith, a Salt Springer with a Twitter account who bought some of my cards and whipped out her Iphone to "follow me".  Met a lady named Mary Lou (?) who says she always looks at my photos because she's in the middle of renovating her house and she loves my photos and wants to buy some when she's done. Hey, that works for me.

Met a woman who had grown up on Salt Spring and was in the Canadian Military. "You must have been raised by two hippies," I said. She laughed and nodded with surprise that I'd pegged it. She's a logistics officer who has been in the military for 16 years and has gone to Afghanistan on three tours of duty. She bought a card.

Was descended upon by a woman who told me all about her beautiful white German Shepherd named Ivar who lived to be ten and how she originally came to be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I listened to her compassionately. She was all worn out from a couple of hours at the market.

I amused myself between customers taking photos of everything and nothing.

Ran into my friend Deborah who had to put her beautiful Boxer, Maggie, to sleep on Friday but seemed to be holding up relatively well after drowning her sorrows in the wine the night before, and the company of a friend from Victoria

George and Gordon dropped by the table. Gordon bought three cards, one for his soon to be arriving grandchild. Said Hi to Karma. Talked to Rachel about why I decided to move on from my day job. Said Hi to a few clients from my now former day job.

Got zeroed in on by a person well known to the community with a major drinking problem. How's that for diplomacy in description? He proceeded to belly up to my table and ooh and aahh in a drunken manner over my photographs. He wanted me to take his photo. I did. Thought that might get rid of him. Stupid idea. He was drinking red wine straight out of the bottle. It was dribbling down his face. I wondered where a) Market Coordinator was b) how long he was going to bother me and c) if the RCMP ever wandered by. I suggested that he might like to sit down in the sunshine in the park. He finally took the hint. 

About 15 minutes later, I walked to the other end of the market and saw him lying on his back, on the pavement, in the middle of the main strip, in the sunshine. Oh my. We might all know who he is but the tourists don't.

Got given, on a silver platter no less, a cupcake from Elizabeth who is selling cupcakes. Got handed $20 from Lorne who sold my matted photo of the Japanese floats while I was in search of something to eat for lunch. 

Talked to Christopher and Jon. Met their respective cute little sons. Talked to Jim and his dad. Look at that family resemblance (below). John is 90 now and still sells his book about his WWII experience of being shot down in a plane, being the only one to survive by parachuting out, and shortly thereafter enduring a long stint at a POW camp. When the son of one of the crew members caught up with him a few years back, I wrote the story of an unlikely reunion, especially since the son had never met his father (another crew member who had died in the crash) and been killed prior to this son's birth. 

Spotted one of my favorite toddlers (from all the toddlers who used to accompany their parents at the employment centre). She was all decked out in a new Tu Tu that her dad bought her carrying a bread stick in one hand and a rainbow coloured flute in the other.

Packed up my table around 3:00 pm with more than enough money to buy some groceries.

Headed to Thriftys.

Turned my head just in time to see previously mentioned well-known person with a drinking problem in the back seat of an RCMP truck.

De ja vu!

Salt Spring Re-experienced in Photos

Blue Horse  Folk Art Gallery

Saturday rolls around so quickly each week, beautiful and hot with throngs of market-goers. August is definitely the main tourist month here.

I enhanced my display by purchasing a large easel made by hand by Keith of Keith and Sherrin who are leaving the island after 19 years. They've sold their beloved home and B&B and I know that they can't help but be a little sad about leaving. She's a watercolour painter who paints whimsical scenes of Salt Spring and of flowers and scenes around the Mediterranean. I bought the easel at their yard sale last week and it really helps to show off my matted photos better. They're such nice people and they've had a few setbacks in the past month. I know things will turn around for them again and I just know it has to be positive to have a piece of their good energy behind me every week.

A sweet little older lady bought four of my photo cards and told me she'd been coming to the island for 37 years! I asked her where she stayed and she said she always stayed at Birdsong B&B. I'd never heard of it but almost every review on Tripadvisor, except for one, was overwhelmingly positive.

I also met the editor of the alumni magazine for the University of Washington. He bought two of my matted prints  - the leaves on the pond at Duck Creek and a barn at Ruckle and he seemed to genuinely love my photos.  There's even a possibility of work coming from that meeting.

I like to know where my photos go after they've been purchased.  Last week a woman who was a chef in a high end restaurant in London, England, bought a large 11x14 of my red window so she could take it with her to New York when she moved there to a new job in some other high end restaurant there.

I like to think of my photos travelling where I haven't been able to get to yet and just the brief interactions with the folks who are touched for some reason by one of my photos is really the best part of the market.

When I'm selling my photos I have to remind myself of my own experience of purchasing someone's work. I went to the big island of Hawaii in 2005.  I bought a small watercolour painting that I absolutely loved. It was an old tin-roofed cottage set back on a property with a little lane leading to its front porch and dwarfed by huge palms and massive ferns. It had the words "old style" scrawled across the bottom in pencil.

I look at that print almost every day and it still brings me joy and transports me back to that little village of Volcano where I purchased it on a day when the rain was teeming down shiny on every piece of greenery and making the giant fiddleheads droop.

I just think of that to remind myself that it's about capturing an aspect of their experience and presenting it back to them as a keepsake. They're buying their own experience. My photos, just happens to re-ignite that in some way for the people they resonate with and since I know what I love about Salt Spring and what captured my own heart, I feel I just have to remind myself of that to help capture theirs.

Winston Churchill Visits Salt Spring Saturday Market

Winston Churchill was at the market and he was damned tired of looking at all that stuff. Geez. Enough already. Where is that woman anyway? It's not enough that she has to practically emasculate me dressing me up like some chi chi  chihuahua with this gold scarfe around my neck but now I have to stand beside him, he who still hasn't figured out that wearing white socks with sandals is fashion suicide. He's got on his Day of the Dead baggy pants paired with Birkenstocks thinkin' he fits in (and the sad part is that he actually does.)  I'm just done!

Salt Spring Saturday Market Focus Groups

Pig Tail

One of the best things about selling your photographs at the Salt Spring Saturday Market is hearing why people choose the photograph that they choose to buy. This pig butt for example or "Pig Tail" was bought by a woman for her brother because it was his birthday and when they were kids he always used to pull her pig tails. I threw it in at the last minute because it's just about the cutest pig tail I've ever seen, not that I've spent a lot of my life paying attention to pigs or their butts. But, hey little piggie, nice tush! I took this last year at the Fall Fair.

Someone else came to my table who caretakes Ruckle Park with her husband. Her mother was visiting and she had to buy one of my photographs of Ruckle. Then, the daughter spotted a sign that she had made for the Fall Fair last year and of course (bless your heart) as soon as her mom heard that it was her daughter's sign she just had to buy it in the form of my new little Canvas "corner brightener" as someone in my band decided I should call them when she dropped by my table. They're photos put onto 4X6 canvases with burnished upholstery pins tacking them down on each corner. They look really good with barns and old doors.

Two people actually bought photos that I'd taken at a store at Fulford called Stuff and Nonsense because one of them always sends her sister a card whenever she goes anywhere and because the other said it was the first store she'd gone into when she first got off the ferry and she liked the store. Here's the railing out the front I think. Sometimes I truly forget where/when I took the photos.

I almost always sell a card or matted print of my photo that I took of a reflection in Coal Harbour while walking along the Stanley Park Seawall. People love this photo.

I recently decided to start selling larger matted photographs of my work, 8x10 matted to 11x14 and I was ecstatic to sell one of my favourites to a guy from Vancouver who liked it right away, hardly said anything to me, then returned and bought it. Of course, it makes sense to sell larger. More money. I call this Aquatic Plaid. I really like that name.

I can't find my list of the other ones that people bought but you get the idea.

The best part about the market is the amount of mental energy you spend trying to sort out exactly what works best and then seeing how right or how wrong you are. There really should be Salt Spring Market Focus Groups that take place all year round so that we know exactly what our customers want before it starts. It's either that or spend 5 years doing it.

Only 4 more days until the next market. Yippee!

Smile! Photo Ops Abound

The bloom came off the rose a little today. Is that the right saying when you lose a little bit of enthusiasm for something you couldn't get enough of? Like when the honeymoon is over. When the third date is past. (that's a joke, sort of!) When the probation period of your job is over.

Or after 3 months of dragging yourself out of bed at 6:00 am on Saturday mornings so you could go to the Salt Spring Market and attempt to make a whopping $65 on your best day selling photographs.

The anticipation was over the top from vendors. The World is coming. The World is coming. It felt a bit like the sky is falling. People came out of the woodwork. People who don't even normally show up but must have accumulated 9 years worth of points from previous market attendance were there. The end result? Mutiny on the grass.

When all the spots filled up and there was still a crowd of vendors hoping to get a spot some people, desperate and disrespectful people I might editorialize, took it upon themselves to think rules, what rules, and set up their tents, booths, etc. wherever they felt they could.

When Karin and I decided that we would rather not be there with that kind of energy, and I returned for a little something for breakfast, one RCMP, one CRD by-law enforcement officer and infamous Driftwood photographer Derrick Lundy was trying to cajole them to stand back to back for a photo op.

Somehow, the magic associated with the market that I've held all these years as a tourist was shot to hell today in less than a couple of hours.

And, if that wasn't enough, when I was walking along the sidewalk after my breakfast, some guy's dog backed up out of the bushes and while taking a shit (the dog, not the guy) managed to get some of the last remnants on my left shoe. I was just about to lose it when the guy looking at his dog said, "Hey buddy, are you okay?" Is the friggin dog okay? What about my god damned shoe? It's a good thing these aren't Manolo Blahniks or he would have had one angry red head to contend with and we wouldn't want that would we? But, I said nothing. How could I get upset? The guy didn't even notice that some of his dog's crap hit my shoe and after the fact, I did see the humour in it.

Welcome to a little Gulf Island paradise! (And it isn't even truly summer yet really!) What hell will break loose in August? I spent the late afternoon having a nap recovering from all the excitement.

Moving on to a more positive note, what today did allow me to do is walk around and see what else is being sold out there and you know what I discovered even more than I already suspected? Everyone and their diahrrea-infected dog is selling some sort of photos. I just figured that out. Now, I have faith that my photos are good but so are quite a few (read a thousand or so) other people's. Go figure?

So, after all that, I headed over to ArtSpring to check out the Photo Lumiere exhibit and really enjoyed the "seeing" of six island professional photographers: Eric Onasick, Janet Dwyer, Gillean Proctor, Steven Friedman, Birgit Freybe Bateman and Osman Phillips.

Nothing I could say to describe their individual seeing would sound anything but trite in comparison to their images and now I have to try and say something intelligent and insightful about that for an article just to top off all the "fun" this weekend.

Luckily Charles is having a party tonight and I'm late...