Ficklin Vinyards Event last night

I had been asked a couple of months ago to display my art at Ficklin Vinyards at a special event. Thanks, K.c. Pomering for inviting me! And thank you, Peter Ficklin, for your hospitality! It was hard work--preparing, setting up by myself (which I don't often have to do, luckily!), talking, talking, talking (which I've been told I DO often do!) to lots of people, tearing down alone and driving home very late. But it was a LOT of fun! Good wine, good food, friendly people, excellent hosts and hostesses, and a lot of wonderful contacts for me, as an artist. I talked to restaurant and hotel owners, winery owners, wine and food and art lovers--and more!

Mostly, I took things related to wine as you can see in the photos. I took 3 large wine paintings, some prints, cards and a couple of small paintings. I sold a small matted original and a small painting so it was a nice evening in that way also. I have some exciting news to share in the near future, but that will come in a future post.

                                                                                                   
In the photos you can see the basic set up. The photos, done on my iPhone, aren't the greatest because of the way the lighting was. But it was interesting because of all the wine barrels surrounding the huge tasting room and because I tried to use the nearby barrels as part of my useable display space. It is always fun and challenging to try to create a welcoming and attractive display area when you are going to a new setting that you haven't previously shown in. I felt comfortable with the way it looked and I really enjoyed meeting a lot of new people from the Madera area. I hope I'll continue my new friendships at the Madera Wine Trail event on November 14-15. That weekend I will be located at Birdstone Winery so you can stop by and say hello!

In closing, I'd like to say that I am going to try to add a little video taken on my iPhone and see if you can view it, hear it and make any sense of it. It is very short and the content is limited. It's more an experiment to see if I can get a video from my phone to my blog successfully. So far, I haven't been able to but maybe today will be my lucky day. (NOTE: It was NOT my lucky day. I'm still struggling with that, though the video is fine on my phone and my desktop. I WILL overcome, but not right now.)

And speaking of "experiments", the last month has been very much a learning process. I love being on Facebook, especially now that I've started a "Fan Page" where I can more easily display my work and invite "fans" and friends to my art events. If we haven't connected there yet, please look for me. My blog is feeding over to Facebook and my Facebook posts are going to Twitter. This is all VERY high tech stuff for me! But it's a lot of fun and it's going well except for Twitter. I am just not tweeting well, as yet! But that will come with time, I suspect.  Well, enough for one post--I'm dying to see if the video works or not!