It's funny what we remember, and what we don't.
Today is October 19th, and that makes this day the 36th Anniversary of when we opened our first art gallery and gift shop in Austin, Texas. I got lucky and found a couple of very old snapshots.
View out through the front window. Scan from 1986 photograph
We were very young, and very hopeful... and ready to conquer the world via the creative arts!
Of course, nothing ever goes as planned, and the whole experience became a long uphill slog that began with our landlord going bankrupt just a few weeks after we opened our doors, and department "anchor store" in the shopping center closing its doors a couple of months later.
We had that store for a little over 13 years, surviving one (external) disaster after another until finally closing at the end of the 1998 holiday season.
In the meantime, I'd like to think the city of Austin learned a few things about glass art!
Entrance to the original gallery, circa 1987. Scan from old photo
More than a decade later, we opened the original Red Dragonfly Gallery here in our local town... and ironically suffered through a long string of (external) disasters before making the decision to close in June 2019, thereby avoiding having to struggle through the Covid mess.
In spite of it all, I can look back on our years in the art business with fondness and gratitude, as there were also many good times... and we met lots of wonderful people along the way. We just seemed to have a close personal relationship with "unfortunate timing!"
I suppose what I have most learned from these experiences is that you should definitely not get into the art and creativity field because you hope to make money! The vast majority of these ventures are lucky to approximately break even. The "reward" primarily comes in the form of guiding and watching aspiring artists in reaching for their dreams.
On the balance, more artists discover that their creative spark is best served by being "weekend creatives" as opposed to trying to become "career artists."
In most cases, the advice we offered typically amounted to telling you artists to just worry about the creative process and not so much about "becoming successful." And some did become very successful...
... one young man was sandblasting designs on cheap glass vessels he'd buy at Goodwill; in time he built a $600,000/year production studio with three full-time employees. And then he retired, because he realized he'd become a businessman, rather than an artist.
What you might think you want isn't always what you really want!
Anyway, writing these words as a sort of memorial tribute to our years in the art business. Now I am just following my own advice and dabbling happily as a weekend creative!
Thanks for stopping by!
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All images are our own, unless otherwise attributed