Big World

We went out to the big world tonight. Point Roberts is thirty minutes from Vancouver Airport, thirty minutes from Richmond with all the malls that Vancouver’s Hong Kongese immigrants could ever want or imagine, and thirty minutes from Steveston’s Silver City, an 18 or so screen movie complex. Also, we are 45 minutes away from Bellingham’s world of shopping and medical care. Thus, we can talk about our isolation, and we are isolated down here, but an end to all that is very nearby if one chooses to go there.

I am occasionally chastised by friends and acquaintances who feel or perhaps even think that ‘I don’t get out enough.’ But, I think I get out just about enough. Somehow, traipsing back and forth between two countries seems quite a bit of ‘out” to me, even though Roberts Creek and Point Roberts share the same sense of isolation. But today, we did make it to the world of art and culture because we made the thirty-minute drive to the Richmond Art Gallery (The RAG). We were there to participate in the big trading night following the one month exhibit of artist trading cards from all over the U.S. and Canada.




I’ve described ATC’s here, but in brief, they are like baseball trading cards in size (2.5"x3.5") but instead of cards picturing guys with chewing tobacco, they are each a little bit of handmade art. They can be in any conceivable medium—oil or acrylic paint, collage, pencil, crayon, watercolor, fabric (not so common), metal (even less common), toothpicks (very rare); and they are traded not sold. The RAG has an open exhibit each year: you send them nine cards in a regular trading card sleeve, and they put everything they get up in an exhibit. It is wonderfully interesting to see hundreds—actually thousands--of these cards, each one different, each one worth looking at for a bit. But of course, you can’t look at them each for very long or you won’t make it very far into the exhibit and your brain will close down from sensory/response overload.

Nevertheless, some of the cards are particularly noteworthy. At the end of the show (which was tonight), everyone who exhibited cards offers the cards up for trade. Even if you aren’t from nearby, you can have someone at the gallery do the trading for you. Last year, I didn’t make it to the trade, but this year I did. My cards (one of the themes, this year, was 'Life As Art’) had a series of fabric elephants who wore their art on their sizable sides.

We arrived just as the trade was about to start. There were maybe 30 people trading their own cards, plus the many cards from the show that were being traded but not personally because the people who made them were from far away. The trading is always a little intimidating. You have to walk up to people and thrust your cards out and while they peruse them, you say, ‘Want to trade with me?’ Everyone always says YES, but there’s always the feeling that someone won’t and I just don’t know quite how I’m going to respond to that if it happens. Probably, I’ll just say OK, and move on, but still.

Tonight, most of the traders were adults, but there were a number of kids with terrific cards. One card I came home with was a brush painting of mandarin oranges, done by a 12 year-old Chinese-Canadian. The kids’ work at every trade I’ve ever been to is the freshest, the most spontaneous, often the best, if not the most technically skilled work there. Another card I brought home is a lovely little painting of a woman holding a cat. That was particularly pleasing not only because it was beautifully executed but because it was made by a woman who lives in a small town in Missouri, right next to the small town in Missouri where my younger daughter lives. I’d been to the cat-painter’s home town, in fact. I’ll probably email her to thank her. Most of the artists include their email addresses and home towns on the back of the cards, along with their names.

People were trading not only their exhibit cards but also other cards that they had brought, so I came home with 24 new cards. Not only that: I got to see the two other exhibits at the gallery. A veritable banquet of art and culture, enough to last me for awhile. Thanks to all the traders and to the very idea of ATC’s itself!