Are you ready to sell your ART at the Downtown Fort Myers Saturday Art Fair?

You have a passion to create and enthusiasm to sell what you create.  You have the inventory required to enter a art or craft fair, the physical stamina and support from your family or friends.  But are you ready to join a retail art and craft fair?  Answer the questions below and see if you are ready to sell your art or craft.

Art Display of Brian Christensen

Bill Hofer - a photography vendor

1. You have sold items you hand-created to your friends.
2. You have given your hand-made items to family and friends; who in turn said they would buy items from you.
3. Your art or craft is well made.
4. You have money put aside for entering a fair, usually around $200.00 to $300.00
5. You enjoy talking about your art.
6. You want to commit your time to producing art and selling it at a fair.
7. You have 50 pieces of art or fine crafts or have the time, money and materials to produce them for a fair.
8. Friends have commissioned pieces of art or fine crafts from you and you have been able to produce the piece to their satisfaction and by the deadline they ask.
9. You can spend 2 to 4 hours at a time, smiling and talking to possible customers.
10. You can take some criticism on your product without getting angry, upset or having your feeling hurt.

If you answered YES to 6 or more of these statements:  

You are ready to get into an art and fine craft fair.

Download the prospectus now and join us the the November 17th for the 

Downtown Fort Myers Saturday Art Fair    Click on download the prospectus now.

If you answered NO to 5 or more statements:

Something is holding you back - look at what you answered no to and try to turn it into a YES.

Remember to sell your work, it has to be good quality, you have to be able to make it regularly, you have to want to sell and talk about your work.  Buyers must like your works as much as you do.  

If you enter an art and fine craft fair and your works are not selling.  

1. You should look at what the other vendors are producing and selling.
2.  Look at the quality of your art or fine craft.
3.  Look at your presentation - presentation of your works is everything!  A great presentation will sell even mediocre art or fine craft.  
4. Make sure that your space is not over crowded, if you made 25 Halloween pumpkin pins - you don't have to place all 25 on the table.  
5. Think in numbers of 3 or 5....this is a pleasing number and makes for better arrangements.  
6. If you have fine art - have an assortment of your best hung and have the rest in browse bins.  

Painted Palm Fronds of  Jean Stanish

Jewelry Creations of Anita Coppolino

ACT Gallery will exhibit Tiite & Kalon Baquero, Jamie Bendola and Tracy Owen-Cullimore in November 2012.

Join Arts for ACT Gallery, located at 2265 First Street in downtown Fort Myers on Friday, November 2, 2012 from 6 to 10 pm for the opening reception and art walk for November 2012.  This month, ACT Gallery will feature “A Quick Recap” a retrospective of culturally significant works from two generations, Artist Tiité Baquero and daughter Kalon Baquero. Father and daughter will transform ACT’s main gallery room into a place of earthy discovery.  The exhibit will be a celebration of Nature, Humanity and the Cultural Innovation.  In a world of chaos and uncertainty, these two artists will bring hope, confidence, and the vigor necessary to overcome the challenges of a modern day world.  Included in this exhibition are the narrative and works of Tiité Baquero’s “Homage to the Orange River Valley, 1982” and “Earth Gallery One, 1990”, histories deeply significant to a critical role for the Arts and to Lee County history itself.  Kalon Baquero will revisit her 2005 Data-A installation “Inappreciable Realities and the Words that Surround Them.”  Gallery visitors will become discoverers of the minute flora and fauna that constitute the environments that in turn, constitute us.  Closer looks at these minute beings reveal an inspiring array of lifestyles, adaptations, and modes of survival that we humans might take great note of in the advancement of our own cultural strategies.  Also featured off the main gallery are Jamie Bendola’s mixed media photographic series “Dead People for Sale to Keep People Alive” proceeds benefit FMCancer, Inc. and Tracy Owen-Cullimore brings her impressionistic paintings of people, pets and more in her wonderfully jewel colored palette. Come downtown for great art and support ACT Gallery and Boutique. 

Tiité Baquero Artist Statement: “The synthesis of my life’s work has been, to give the arts back something that was lost and something that art never had; meaning and a critical function that contains practical utility.  Happily both have been accomplished.”

Tiité Baquero was born in Bogotá Colombia, South America in 1949.  He became an American citizen in 1996.  He managed to survive to the age of 63 this year and is glad to be able to exhibit a lifetime of work, representing a timely contribution to civilization.  Tiité thinks humanity has come to this axis age where the effect of our technological development and the structure of our cultural context is no longer sustainable by any measure or can no longer be obscured by the best creative form of denial. His work is at this time, a viable contribution of what we can do to evolve and gradually replace one current unsustainable cultural strategy.  His life’s work dovetails, in the worldwide Peace Marker Project, which is currently making forward progress to create our specie’s first global work of art.  Baquero completed 52 new works, which bring to the foreground the strength, and maturity of what will be called “Data A” art, a new art form in the context of life.  A mature art form developed from and because of the work of the preceding years.    

Kalon Lucia Baquero was born in Fort Myers, Florida but raised on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.  Kalon has been traversing the landscape where art dances in synchrony with life since an early age.  Her father, Tiité and nature have been her teachers, one forever commenting on and exploring the lessons of the other, always inviting conversation and contemplation on life and art.  Her work have been exhibited in Hawaii and Florida, and recognized by the respective local governments, media outlets, and a wide range of members in both communities.   

Kalon’s Artist Statement: In Kalon’s mind’s eye, she muses on a new era for the Arts; one in which the ingenuity and brilliance of creative minds are applied towards devising solutions to the very real and overwhelming problems that our world currently faces.  She made a conscious decision at age 20 to dedicate her life’s work to the exploration of this possible new era.  Kalon had been creating “seed projects” within the “Data-A Art” of her fathers.  It is her ideal that each of these “seed projects” arouses new collaborations between art and life, humanity and Nature, you and I and us and them.    

Jamie Bendola, two years ago at 25 years old, went into the emergency room.  The doctors found a large mass of fluid in her stomach that was surrounding a tumor on the ovary. She diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Two months later, she went to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida and had a second staging performed along with a complete abdominal hysterectomy.  During this time, she missed a significant amount of work. If it had not been for financial support from friends she would have lost her car or been evicted from my apartment. Many young cancer patients are not as fortunate. This is why Bendola decided to start a non-profit called FMCancer. 

FMC MISSION: Provide hope, humor, resources and grants to help YOUNG ADULTS both FIGHT cancer and SURVIVE the wrath it can leave behind.

Bendola’s main focus is to provide free resources and yearly grants to young adults with cancer and survivors. FMC is an art based non-profit, with the motto "Live Life Outside The Lines". Her new series entitled "Dead People For Sale To Keep People Alive," is a creative series of enhanced photography featuring mega-celebrities that have died.  Prints will also be available.  

Tracy Owen Cullimore paints in both watercolor and oil, specializing in portraits of animals and people, and she happily does custom commission work.  Tracy is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Art History and Economics. Upon graduation, she returned to school to pursue formal training in Advertising and Graphic Design as well as the traditional fine arts.

Tracy is a member and supporter of ACT, the American Impressionists Society, Art League of Fort Myers, The Florida Watercolor Society, The Alliance for the Arts, Fort Myers Beach Art Association, The Portrait and Figure Painters Society of SW Florida and the Sanibel/Captiva Art League.  She was a long time acrylic student of the late Gale Bennett as well as Lucy Macherowski.  She studied oil with national masters: Rose Frantzen, CW Mundy, Quang Ho and Carolyn Anderson and watercolor under Pat Weaver and Janet Rogers.

Tracy enjoys teaching and helping her student's develop their individual styles.  

Cullimore’s Artist’s Statement “As an artist, my mission is to record moments in time with a personal perspective, not a direct reflection as a photograph would replicate. I am not the reporter with a camera, but the artist with a brush.”~ Tracy Owen Cullimore

Jamie Golob to donate a portion of her proceeds from workshops at the Lee County Alliance for the Arts to ACT Shelter

Jamie Golob instructor at the Lee County Alliance for the Arts will donate a portion of her proceeds from her classes offered Oct 25 – Oct 27, 2012 and Feb 21 – Feb 23, 2013 at the Lee County Alliance for the Arts to Abuse Counseling and Treatment’s clients, the survivors of domestic and sexual violence and human trafficking.

Jamie Golob is happy to collaborate with ACT and bring the arts and community together to benefit the ACT shelter. Students can register through the Lee County Alliance for the Arts at www.artinlee.org or by calling 239-939-2787.  Prospective students may view Golob’s works at Arts for ACT Gallery through October 1, 2012, where she is the featured artist in the main gallery, displaying over 25 works with a variety of styles and media. 

Here is the description of Golob’s workshop and price

THE DYNAMIC LANDSCAPE: MIXED MEDIA ACRYLIC PAINTING

Three Class Sessions, Thurs-Sat, 9AM-4PM

Instructor: Jamie L. Golob

JG49 Oct 25 - Oct 27

JG10 Feb 21 - Feb 23

Price: $125 Member/$150 Non-Member

Explore color, texture, collage, surface design and composition with artist Jamie Golob. Mix wet and dry media; learn how to combine materials and understand how different materials work alone and together to discover new and dramatic techniques that cannot be accomplished with both traditional and alternative materials. Get your creative mind to think in new ways. Personal direction is emphasized and you will receive constructive critiques. Beginner through advanced skill levels welcome. Experience and enthusiasm create an atmosphere of fun and spontaneity inspiring new directions and discovery through innovative combinations of design and materials. Layering of textures creates depth involving line, shape, color and tone in both abstract and representational subjects. During the course, the class will explore the various supports such as canvas, illustration board and watercolor paper. Additionally we will be experimenting with specialized industrial supplies for textures.

 Biography:

Jamie Golob earned her BFA from Eastern Michigan University and has trained privately in the area of Classical Realism. Her work can be found and has been shown throughout the states.  Jamie pursues her passion as an award winning artist and teacher instructing art/life-drawing and painting workshops abroad. Ms. Golob is affiliated with community outreach efforts and champions fine arts programs in southwest Florida. She is currently the Education Director for Lee County’s Alliance for the Arts and Co-Executive Director of the Southern Atelier in Sarasota Florida. 

          

October 2012 brings 4 Talented Female Artists

Anne McCarty’s name was up in lights as the winner of an Easter coloring contest at age 5.  She has taught for 14 years to both children and adults at the Alliance for the Arts, Art League of Bonita Springs, Visual Arts Center, Punta Gorda, Pine Island Art Association and other venues. Many local, state and national shows have given awards to McCarty’s work. Oil, acrylic, watercolor, drawing and mixed media are part of the repertoire. Artwork bearing the name McCarty is collected across the nation and internationally.

McCarty Artist Statement: “Art comes from a place beyond other worldly reach.  It controls, contorts, manipulates and when it is done, no one is the same.  We are transported there through the images. Wild, calm, reverent, irreverent, it matters not.  All that matters is the journey.  Things seen, yet unseen, unfold under the artists hand and before the viewers’ eyes.  Both are enriched by the experience.  Where does this force come from and where does it lead us, we don’t know.  All we know is we must follow its beck and call.  This is a call to the artist to express what needs expression.  A color, a glance, a line, a form, all has its’ place in art.  Personal, yet universal, understood, yet mystifying, this is art.” ~ Anne McCarty

Terry Lynn Spry’s paintings have been exhibited in national and local juried art exhibitions.  Her work can be found in private collections across the country.  Terry graduated from the Phoenix Institute of Technology with a degree in production art and went on to study with Nina Connor.  Her desire to pass on her passion and love for the arts lead her to begin teaching at the Alliance of the Arts.  She considers painting to be “better than chocolate and kinda like breathing you just don’t want to stop.”

Judy Quest produces softy muted, ethereal works in oil and pastel in a wide range of natural subjects, all cast in a pearly sheen that adds a romantic feeling to her sunsets, figures, seascapes, landscapes, flowers, foliage and wildlife.  The artist layers, blends, and juxtaposes colors, and through these methods, the saturated surface seems to glow with pigments.  There is always a sense of movement stilled in the depth of many subtle colors.  Her female figures often the subject of her artwork are caught out of time, frozen in a moment of kinetic energy.  Judy’s dreamlike snapshots of Floridian landscape and female figures engender a uniquely feminine pastoral sensibility.  Luminous, omnipresent, and charmingly embellished with details worth exploring, Quest’s work achieves a painterly quality all her own.

Pam Peters’  artwork is a celebration of life and nature. The most recent works, Portraits of the Earth & Portraits of Peru, are mixed media presentations of original photography printed on watercolor paper and enhanced with watercolor paint.

Peters’ Art Statement – “I believe that my art provides a window in time that we look through together to simultaneously share the emotional experience evoked by my work.    I use various media, primarily watercolor, because I love the movement of water and paint across the surface of the paper.   The fluidity and transparency of the medium matches the rhythm and visual impact of the patterns that nature creates and that I am reflecting in my work.” ~ Pam Peters    

These exhibits continue through Monday, October 30, 2012.   

Join ACT Gallery on October 5th from 6 to 10 pm at Art Walk...talk with the artists and enjoy the great ART!  Remember Buy ART at ACT and Save or Change a LIFE!

Happy Halloween!

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http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Calendar-of-Events-for-Arts-for-ACT-Gallery-and-Boutique.html?soid=1103630347389&aid=9PZ3kSOu_LQ

Arts for Act: September Artists bring Classical Painting, Abstra...

Arts for Act: September Artists bring Classical Painting, Abstra...: Join Arts for ACT Gallery, located at 2265 First Street in downtown Fort Myers on Friday, September 7, 2012 from 6 to 10 pm for the openi...

September Artists bring Classical Painting, Abstraction and Collage

Join Arts for ACT Gallery, located at 2265 First Street in downtown Fort Myers on Friday, September 7, 2012 from 6 to 10 pm for the opening reception and art walk for September 2012.  This month, ACT Gallery will feature Jamie L. Golob, Collagist, Dale Weber and Troy Thomas. These creative artists should not be missed.  Come downtown and support ACT Gallery and Boutique.  

Arts for ACT Gallery's Boutique will be featured in the Davis Art Center's Fashion Show on September 7th during Art Walk starting at 7 pm. Come down and see the great fashion items available at our boutique. 

Jamie Golob earned her BFA from Eastern Michigan University and has trained privately in the area of Classical Realism. Her work can be found and has been shown throughout the states.  Jamie pursues her passion as an award winning artist and teacher instructing art/life-drawing and painting workshops abroad. Ms. Golob is affiliated with community outreach efforts and champions fine arts programs in southwest Florida. She is currently the Education Director for Lee County’s Alliance for the Arts and Co-Executive Director of the Southern Atelier in Sarasota Florida. 

      

Jamie Golob Artist Statement:

“My work is inspired by my impressions of life- the good the bad and the ugly. As I continue to grow not only as a person but as an artist I find myself seeing more and more that in one way or another - everything is connected. I have this sense of urgency in trying to define and understand the world and people around me. There are times that I feel as though being able to express myself through my painting is my only true way of reaching out and belonging to something bigger and complete. I view the arts as a place where all people come together, even if for just one instant, not for any other reason than the simple joy and appreciation of beauty and expression. We may all find something different for ourselves from the very same piece. The greatest thing of all is that beauty in art can be so many things, a certain color or fleeting brush stroke can bring back a memory, a thought, an image of childhood. Sometimes the best memories are even the sad ones. Sad for a while but happy in that they simply must be. Some of my work has a definite subject matter and at times is more abstract in thought- but always expressive. When I paint it is my time to let out my interpretations of what I've seen and have experienced. I find a definite connection between positive and negative in life and so in my art as well. It's the spirit of life that I wish to capture. Happy compliments sorrow just as blue does orange. Turbulent times and days of rest stumble across our paths like multi dimensional textures and sheens of brilliance or opalescence. It's the variety in life and art that ultimately give it harmony. This is something I've purposely sought to include. I find that, as many, I am at times a person of habit. Repetition and a hint of consistency, I feel often, keep me sane. I use patterns and color literally in my work to function as the underlying stability of any situation we may be faced with in life. Sometimes, when life is being particularly tough, this can be our salvation. My hope is that it in my reaching out with every piece I will find common ground with many who can share in my love.” ~ Jamie Golob

Troy Thomas a local artist based in Fort Myers, has been dabbling in art since he was a child.  However, it wasn’t until after returning from a combat mission to Iraq in 2004 that he got serious about creating paintings and other art.  Troy moved to Southwest Florida in 2005 and immediately started getting involved in the local art scene.  He often experiments in other genres of art, but his main passion lies in paintings.  Many of his works include vibrant colors.  His current series of paintings are heavily influenced by geometric abstraction.

Dale Weber's found object assemblages and collages reflect his interest in the eastern aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi combined with his personal view of reincarnation. Since all matter is energy, he feels the inanimate is also destined to lead subsequent lives. He senses that hidden purpose of each bit of refuse he finds and cultivates its new growth. When asked about his process, he replies, "If I listen carefully the relic will speak not of its past but of its possibilities." Under his guidance, its previous life disappears as it takes on a new role.  When dissimilar pieces are enjoined in conversation, individual contexts disappear creating new meanings. Sometimes philosophical; sometimes whimsical; always uniquely different.

September Art Exhibits continue through Monday, October 1, 2012.

Remember ~ Buy at ACT and Save or Change a LIFE!