September 2010: Diane McWhorter, Ephemera
The Number One Most Amazing Fact about Diane McWhorter and her Market booth: She brings it all on a bike trailer! All of it, all the racks, the shirts, the hats, the umbrellas, the bags, all of it. On a bike trailer. The whole thing. Look at it. That’s a lot of stuff to jam onto a bike trailer. The bike and the trailer fit in behind her booth, along with Raven Moon’s bike and trailer that he brings his booth on. This could easily be the most eco-friendly corner in the whole Market, which is pretty darn eco-friendly in the first place.
It makes sense that Diane would try to go easy on the Earth, as she is a keen observer of nature. Have a look at her designs and you’ll see they fall into two categories - nature and human nature. There are drawings of plants, trees, crows and the occasional slug. And then there are the proud proclamations of our foibles and idiosyncrasies that Diane is really known for, like “Geezer Gone Wild”, “I make stuff up”, and this season’s apparent favorite “Stay Calm, nothing is under control.”
Diane has been a Market member for 34 years (out of 40). Diane is completely self taught as an artist, starting out as an itinerant sign painter. She first sold greeting cards at the Market, learning to silk screen to be able to produce more of them. Pretty soon, t-shirts were added to the product line.
With a product like t-shirts, it’s important to have a wide variety of designs, and a large number of choices of size and color to please your wide variety of customers. This can lead to a booth dissolving into a jumble of visual confusion. Diane has worked hard to tame the clutter and make her work accessible. It helps a lot that the product colors work well together, keeping to purples, greens, blues and neutrals. It’s also smart to employ as much vertical space as possible, using racks and shelves to organize and leave floor space for customers. I also appreciate that sizes and prices are clearly marked, in big enough letters to read without my glasses.
This season, you can find Diane in space 120, on the northwest corner of the fountain on the West Park Block. If you’d like to learn more about Diane and her creative processes, read her musings about life on the Park Blocks and making art from Jello, she has a delightful blog over at divinetension.blogspot.com.
