Artisan Market

Some local residents in Nordegg just opened a new business.  Over the winter a new building was constructed beside the Shell Station.  The Miner's Cafe moved from the old school house museum, to one half of this new building.  The Beehive Artisan Market set up in the other side.  It is a really cool little shop that sells all sorts of artisan products.  There are t-shirts and clothing items, paintings, metal sculptures and photographs.  They also have a selection of organic produce in coolers, and some other food items.  There is a lot of tourist traffic here over the warmer months so I think they should do quite well.

I approached the owners and asked if they would be interested in showing my black and white photography.  They were, and it turns out that the owner already knows of me.  He is friends with two members of the Monochrome Guild and has been out to some of our group shows back in Edmonton, in years past.   The acceptance was just a formality and they told me that they expected it was only a matter of time before I approached them.

So, I will be putting a bunch of my prints on consignment.  These will be 11" x 14" prints to start, which I will follow up with some smaller 8" x 10" ones.  Depending on how much interest there is, I may also do some larger ones.  The prints will be dry mounted and matted and presented unframed in crystal bags.  Unframed prints are faster and more economical for me to produce, and help to keep the selling price down.  I will mount them to standard sizes so that the buyer can purchase their own inexpensive frame... assuming anything sells.  Kind of have to try and find a sweet spot as far as price goes so that I can still make a decent return after paying the commission to the market.  Plus, they don't have a lot of available wall space at the market to hang up all the artwork that is available.  A tabletop display is necessary.  I've never been involved in photography for the money, but believe that my work is good enough that is should command a reasonable price.  There are quite a few hours of work that go into making prints and mounting them, not to mention the artistic ability to create the image in the first place.  Film, chemistry, paper and matboard are all becoming very expensive.

When I was back home in the city from June 2nd to 10th I spent two days down in my darkroom and made 34 prints, 11" x 14", from eight different negatives.  The snapshots below are of the prints as I worked on them.  On June 9 and 10 I spent two days clearing, toning, washing and drying all the prints.  I hung them up to dry and laid them out on screens just before I headed back out to Nordegg.  Unfortunately they were not ready to bring along, but the Beehive is OK with me bringing them out in a week or so.  Their official grand opening is on June 26 and there will be a big event with Edmonton musician Bill Bourne playing over at the Community Hall.