SVM: As I walk through the fair, I don’t see a sea of red dots. At 7:30 p.m., I decide to take a different approach: Ask. At the Traver Gallery, a staff member told me that a sculpture by Marita Dingus (priced between $12,000 and $14,000) had been sold to a private collector. Although the agreement has been signed, it is not yet official.
comics: Dingus isn’t the only Seattle artist selling work right off the bat: Just before 8 p.m. at PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, I spot red dots on the labels belonging to two recent acrylic-on-linen abstract paintings. from a longtime Seattle artist. Victoria Harbour. Chekhov’s moon and Trail Marker II (Hozomeen) sold for $5,000 and $2,300, respectively.
SVM: I notice another red dot at the Harris/Harvey Gallery, an oil painting by Bay Area artist Hiroshi Sato titled “Noted Within.” Between an Edward Hopper painting and a Cubist painting, the scene of a woman lying on a bed was sold for $7,800 to a local private collector, a former client of the gallery. “We hadn’t seen them for a few years,” says gallery director Sarah Harvey. “We reconnected at the fair.”
comics: Connecting with people at the art fair is best achieved through a combination of GPS and conjuring. Every several stalls or so, I see someone standing in the middle of an aisle on their phone, saying things like, “No, I’m at B13. I’m not moving. Come get me.” My own phone is a string of text messages that read, “At D01. Now E09. Oops, now C07.
Soon I get another familiar feeling from past Seattle art fairs – bumping into people who say, “You’ve got obtained to see the room around the corner. I ask them where, exactly, and they bend their arm and point and point out, “It’s right in this corner! I never find it.
