Art Market Refugee

On Sunday we went to Burlington to say goodbye to friend, artist, and collaborator, Cristine Cambrea. She has had an amazing run as an emerging artist, quickly gaining recognition when she started selling her work in 2004 and maintaining sales large enough to live on on with art alone. However, with the downturn in the art market, the well has run, at least temporarily, dry. As a result, she has left Vermont for less expensive living digs in Florida. Of course, this is probably a great career move in the long run being that the art market in FL is light years beyond what it is in VT, and I know she was getting more than a little tired of the cold (-16 on Sunday morning), but her decision to move was a bit of a shock - coming very suddenly.

Before she left I also wanted to split up the remaining collaborations that we did a year and a half ago. She had been going to Home Depot and drawing on pine planks and plywood, using the grain pattern as a starting point for her art, as I do but in a much different way - so I thought it would be interesting to see what happened when she had some really nice wood to play with. There was a bit of a learning curve to figure out how best to work together so these were in a way, experimental. Hopefully, we will get a chance to do some much better work in the future.

Here she is repairing one of the pieces we did on beech. A gap opened up in the middle so I needed to fill it and then have her redraw over what I sanded off. Behind her is her first (and not to be sold) canvas painting from 2004 - very Hundertwasser-esque - which is interesting because she had never heard of him until people started making the comparison.

The two above are the ones that Cristine was taking, "Double Vision" and "Pondering the Options/Dreamscape"
These are the two that I am keeping, "Parallel Universes," and "Old Soul", plus the one she was repairing, "Head of the Family."