Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is coming soon!

Presented in Reston Town Center, a suburb of Washington, DC, the festival attracts art lovers, affluent homeowners, corporate executives, and design professionals in addition to the broader community. This highly-anticipated cultural event draws up to 30,000 visitors and there is FREE garage parking all Festival weekend courtesy of Boston Properties. The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is the Greater Reston Art Center’s (GRACE’s) largest annual fundraiser.

The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival as a long standing reputation for presenting high-quality work and now will become a three-day event, opening on Friday, from 10am-5pm! Making the very significant logistical investment in a Friday opening reflects our relentless focus on investing to grow our audience (and we typically draw tens of thousands of visitors already) and driving sales, explaining why ArtFairCalendar.com has described this as a festival where “the ‘art stars’ of the outdoor art fairs vie for spaces.”

I've done this show for several decades now... skipping a year here and there, but I will be back this year in booth 230 - so come by and say hi!

Check out the 2018 exhibiting artists here and also a festival map!

Montgomery County is buying art!

DEADLINE: FRIDAY APRIL 20, 2018

I'm not gonna take all the credit --- but, if you recall from multiple postings last year, I corresponded with all MoCo politicos last year and tried to shame one of the planet's wealthiest county's lack of support for its artists... And now: AHCMC and the Montgomery County Public Art Trust are proud to announce the 2018 Call for Art: The Contemporary Works on Paper Collection! This call seeks paper-based works including paintings in various media, drawings in various media, photographs, mixed media, and limited edition prints from artists in Montgomery county and the Greater Washington region.  These artworks should help create inspiring spaces that foster innovation, creative excellence and personal reflection. Artwork in this collection is owned by Montgomery County under the County’s Public Art Trust program and loaned to County agencies for display in public buildings. The Public Art Trust is especially interested in artworks that reflect the unique and diverse character of Montgomery County. The full call-for-art is available here: Montgomery County Contemporary Works on Paper Call for Art

Call for Solo Exhibition Proposals

Deadline: March 30, 2018.

VisArts invites artists working in all media to apply for 2019 Solo Exhibitions in the Gibbs Street Gallery and Common Ground Gallery. The Gibbs Street Gallery offers exhibitions that explore the breadth of contemporary art featuring emerging to mid-career artists. Exhibits reflect a wide range of media and experimental approaches that offer the viewer unexpected interactions with art. The gallery is approximately 1,100 square feet with 16 ft. ceilings.

It is on the street level with floor to ceiling windows along one wall. International, national and local artists are welcome to apply.  The Common Ground Gallery features exhibitions that reflect the creative pursuits of artists from our community.

The gallery is located on the second floor and is approximately 300 square feet.

Artists must live in the Mid-Atlantic region to apply for a solo exhibition in this gallery. Applicants who have participated in a solo exhibition at VisArts within the past two years are not eligible to apply.

All application materials must be submitted online through their website no later than 11:59 pm EST on 03/30/2018.

Visit this link to apply.

Affordable Art Fair NYC opens tonight!

Call for Entries: The World of Frida at Bedford Gallery

The exhibition will feature art with Frida Kahlo as the subject as well as artworks inspired by her life and art. 

The deadline to apply is April 21, 2018.

Details here.

Free Art Lessons

In 2017, Lieu launched Art Prof, a website that offers a wide range of art classes, captured in videos. Taught by professional artists and university art teachers, courses range from the basics, like drawing, to more complex or niche mediums, like types of sculpture, printmaking, and animation. 

Read the Artsy article here. 

Womanizing Denisovan?

My National Geographic DNA test a few years ago discovered that I was 2% Neanderthal and 1% Denisovan, and as this article notes, one of my ancestors clearly was one of those hominids who was pretty much tapping everything in sight regardless of species... cough, cough...

Read the article here.

Guerrilla framing techniques

This post from well over a decade ago is still a good lesson:

A strategy for saving money on framing costs...

According to some stats I read a few years ago in a framing trade magazine, the average cost of framing in the Greater DC region was $67 an hour. It’s probably more than that now.

Other than time, framing two-dimensional work is often the most expensive step in organizing an exhibition (to the artist), and it’s astounding how little most art schools prepare students (and faculty) for avoiding the trap of spending a lot of money on framing.

There are some steps that artists can take to significantly reduce the cost of framing. Here I will try to list the most common mistakes, how to avoid them, and more importantly, how to get your artwork framed for a lot less than taking it to a framing shop to get it framed.

First and foremost: Prepare! Do not leave your framing to the very last minute. Having said that, I know that most of you will leave the framing to the last minute and then panic – go to your neighborhood framing shop, and drop way too much money to get custom frames made for your artwork. If you can afford it, and the price history of you artwork can sustain it – then skip this posting. But if you want to save a lot of money on framing, then prepare!

Do not, under any circumstances let the gallery or a second party take care of your framing unless you have the full costs ahead of time and in writing. Otherwise you will get stuck at the end of your exhibition with a framing bill rather than a commission check.

First of all: If (and only if) you can, work in standard sizes. Most photographers and painters already do. But unless your compositional demands call for it (like mine do), avoid working in one of a kind sizes. American and European standard sizes are different, but US sizes cover a huge range of sizes, such as 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 12x16, 20x24, etc. If you can work within one of those sizes – i.e. do your watercolor on a sheet in one of those sizes, or print your photo on paper that size, etc. then half the battle is won, as then you should be able to buy ready-made frames that will automatically accommodate your matted work. This is important, as a good frame from any craft store, or from any art catalog, is usually a lot less than having one built from scratch! For example, a 16x20 metal molding frame, back metal brace/clips, wire, glass, pH-balanced acid free mat, hanging wire and acid free foam core backing is anywhere from $20 - $30 in any art catalog or locally from Apex in Alexandria. Having the exact same frame hand-made in a frame shop is around $100.

If your work, because of composition or whatever, doesn’t fit into a standard size mat or frame, then another tactic is to go and shop for a ready-made frame that is larger than your artwork – at least three inches all around the diameter of the artwork. Then take that frame and your artwork to a frame shop and have them cut the mat for you. Now you are only paying for the labor and materials to cut a mat – not to build everything from scratch.

If you can’t find a frame in a shop that fits your unique sizes, then shop through art supply catalogs and have them make you one. The savings over storefront framers is still significant. I personally buy a lot of frames from this place. Once you sign up, you get their catalogs as well, and then I hit them when they have a sale going on! From any supplier you can order moldings in one inch increments, so if your work is 18x30 inches, then you'd order a set of 18 inch molding, a set of 30 inch molding and it will be delivered with the hardware needed to assemble it - all you'll need is a screwdriver. Then visit your local glass shop for a piece of glass.

Because most solo shows involve a larger number of works, you should start thinking way ahead of time as to the number of frames that you will need. If you can decide that you will need twenty frames for your show, and you know what size they will all be, then go shopping for ready-made frames in any of our local area arts and crafts stores, or other stores that stock frames, such as IKEA or Bed, Bath and Beyond. Once you find a frame that you like, turn it over and see who makes them. Write the manufacturer’s information down, and when you get home, call the manufacturer of the frame and place an order for the number of frames that you will need. You are now buying the frames wholesale and saving yourself the entire store mark-up!

Don’t let the process of establishing an account with the frame manufacturer scare you. They may require an Employee Identification Number (EIN) – you can give them your social security number-- and they will have a minimum purchase (usually $250) – but by the time that you purchase 20-25 frames, that will be easy to meet. All you are doing is ordering the frame directly from the manufacturer rather than buying them through a store – it’s perfectly legal and saves you a considerable amount of money.

If you work on canvas, you may not even need to frame them. Ask the gallery owner – a lot of galleries will be happy to hang canvasses that are “gallery dressed.” That means that the edge of the canvas wraps to the back and that’s where it is stapled – rather than the side. We actually prefer to show canvas paintings that way.

Do not cheapen your artwork by choosing cheap materials. At all costs avoid using acidic mats (use only pH-balanced, acid free mats) and do not use cardboard to back the work – use acid free foam core. Using cheap materials not only damages the work eventually (as the acid migrates to the artwork) but also tells a potential collector that you are not serious as an artist to properly display your work. I am shocked at the number of badly hand-cut mats in acidic mats that I see in galleries all over the country – a lot of time is just plain ignorance of the business side of the fine arts – and the importance of presentation of artwork in a professional environment – such as a reputable fine arts gallery should be.

If you are an artist that moves a lot of work a year, then you should seriously consider learning how to cut your own mats. A sheet of museum quality archival 32x40 inches mat board is around $6-8 and you can get four 16x20 inches mats from it. To have one 16x20 archival mat cut in a frame shop will be around $20. You can buy a decent mat cutter for around $150, and it comes with a video to teach you how to cut mats.

The bottom line is that minimizing framing costs not only reduces the amount of money that an artist has to invest in offering a show, but also reduces the price point of the artwork – a very important issue, especially for young, emerging artists without a sales history track.

Campello artwork

Not me, Little Junes' art!

"Alien spaceship dropping off a giant magnet on planet Earth"
Graphite on paper by Anderson Campello. 4x4 inches. Circa 2018

Old art school drawings

Just for fun.., a few drawings, collages, paintings, etchings, linocuts, stone lithos, etc., executed as assignments during my schooling at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle (1977-1981).

Most of these were sold by me at the Pike Place Market, also in Seattle, where I used to sell all my school assignments as soon as they were graded... usual going price was between $5 and $25 bucks, plus a traded a lot of work to the fishermen who worked the market... usually not for fish, but for geoducks or clams or mussels.