After many years of neglecting my artistic endeavors, the Oden Brewing Fall Equinox Festival 2022 revitalized my dreams. Thank you to everyone who attended, participated in the giveaway, and helped me set up my beautiful booth and Bailey the bus’s lounge!
The Meaning of Mabon (Fall Equinox)
Mabon is the pagan holiday for the time of harvest, celebrating all that you’ve yielded from the year and blessing one’s winter with prosperity. Not only did I spend the month leading up to the festival working twelve hour days between my jobs and prepping the prints for sale, but the entire year was a challenge of applying my productivity for worthwhile outcomes. This festival was, symbolically in a way I hadn’t intended, everything that Mabon was meant to be – a pat on my own back, honking my own horn, and eating and having the fruitcake of my own labor.
And I couldn’t have done it without my friends and family. My mom, who has been and will always be my greatest investor; my dad, whose pride in my artistic abilities is my most powerful motivator; my partner, who not only built the structures for display, purchased all the decor for Bailey, cooked all the. meals while Photoshop held me by the throat, but also continuously reminded me that I deserved it all; my friends, who were not only present but remained for the greater part of the event and regularly reminded me to sit and enjoy myself rather than work the entire time; so many others including my stepparents, Pete’s parents, roommates, and the Oden crew; and a special thanks to Bob Powell who, upon hearing me finally agree to be a vendor after a month’s consideration said, “Good, ’cause you’re already on the list.”
ABSGELLER Prints and Stickers
Instead of creating all new digital drawings and illustrations for printing, I decided to (finally) make use of my enormous store of art pieces. After forcing poor Peterson into taking inventory with me, we discovered that my fixation for creation has amounted to a whopping total of over 200 mostly finished visual pieces of art. For every one of these, there are likely twenty more that are either sketches, given away, lost or tossed.
Having accounted for these 200 pieces, I then took the following steps:
- Organized them into categories and selected a relatively even amount of pieces from each category for reproduction
- Brought the physical pieces to All Star Printing for scanning
- Inserted the best ones into Photoshop and modified them for print use
- Printed 2-5 copies of each in standard sizes
- Using transparent sleeves and colored paper of varying types, “framed” them for sale in the sleeves
- Wrote, printed, and pasted an artist statement for each respective print
The stickers were printed onto 8.5×11 sticker paper and hand cut by myself, Bob, Jada, and Sofia. Thanks for the help, guys!
Bailey the Bus Lounge
If a festival can host her, Bailey the Bus is coming with me. So the night before, we loaded her up with everything – all the furniture, hay bales, foldable tents and tables, and extension chords. At 9 AM day of (an hour late by our own plans), Bailey rolled into Oden’s parking lot with their event coordinator recording the moment – shout out to Chee Chee for all her help in coordinating, decorating, and most of all appeasing my anxieties!
We slapped rugs on Bailey’s metal floor, carried some of Oden’s rocking chairs in, and displayed our prized vintage Cheerwine bench. Pete had rebuilt the staircase for her back end which we enticed visitors to enter with hay bales and cardamoms. My greatest pride in her decor was the use of hook magnets to hang white sheets and Christmas lights on the ceiling. The effect was that of glowing, dreamy clouds when the sun went down. By the end of the night, we had to kick people off in order to finally go home around midnight. It was a magical day.
Royal Jelly, Ashley Virginia, Viva La Muerte
We Greensboro-ers (Greensborians? Greensboreans?) all know these guys, and they killed it at his fest! The vibe couldn’t have been more hippie rockin’ funk with any other combination of artists. Ashley Virginia rolled out the first posivibe energies dancing barefoot on the grass off stage, Royal Jelly brought the fun with their passionate collective of unique sounds, and Viva La Muerte’s psychedelic wave kept us jamming as the night cooled.
Oden Brewing Fall Equinox Festival 2022
The Oden Brewing Fall Equinox Festival 2022 was a turning point for me to get back in gear with my art. Evidently, there were many other vendors and creative individuals present whose business names unfortunately I did not record but were still fantastic folk present that day. If you are one of those venders and would like to be listed in this blog post, please contact me with your name and info and a preferred picture and I will happily cite you!
absgeller 
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