CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — Tristan MacGregor was keen to show his trading cards.
“They’re all shipwrecks,” he said, surveying his body of work.
At 7, Tristan was barely able to reach across the table the 30-some two-by-three-inch cards were displayed on, but his knowledge of his material was impressive.
“I wish I was on the RMS Titanic. It has a beautiful grand staircase. It comes down, like, a kilometre long.”
His mother, Marieve MacGregor, helped with the cutting and the writing, but the ships and the information were all Tristan’s.
“Some are real, some are imaginary, but they all have stories,” said Marieve.
Tristan was trading his cards at the 13th annual Artist Trading Card swap at the Confederation Centre of the Arts on Aug. 8.
Organized by Monique Lafontaine, the event hosted just over 30 artists of all persuasions and skill levels.
Everyone had spread their wares on tables circling one of the upper galleries.
The vaulted ceilings and the latest collections of Canadian art combined with the dulcet guitar tunes from John Rehder to make a high-brow venue.
Partway through the evening, Wyatt Ford, whose cards were robot-shaped collages, came up to Lafontaine. She hugged his shoulder and asked how he was enjoying himself.
Wyatt, 5, nodded and smiled before running off to join his new friends, Tristan and Elsa McQuaid, another young artist with an abstract origami collection to trade.
To kick off the business portion of the evening, Lafontaine asked each trader to share some words on their collection.
Artists shared tales of bird feathers, lavender fields, favourite stories, poetry, intrusive thoughts, one-panel comics, discarded photographs and new artistic ventures.
“They’re little,” said one artist. She got into art a year ago and decided to focus her efforts on the trading-card-sized works. “How much room could they take up?”
This earned a laugh from the rest of the artists, as everyone related to the way supplies multiply.
Once the introductions were complete, the trading began.
Everyone picked up the box provided and moved one station to their right, in front of a different artist’s cards. A bell rang signalling 45 seconds to choose a card. When the bell rang again, the process was repeated until everyone had one of everyone else’s cards.
Solemn murmuring filled the space as friends and family circled the tables together, earnestly looking over the art on display.
Lafontaine has been in charge of the trade for around a decade. It has become a social as well as an artistic gathering.
“I wanted to make it an event,” said Lafontaine. She scheduled a break after 20 trades for folks to grab a drink and catch up with each other.
“You look around, you see pockets of people chatting… (not to mention) the legions of families who do this thing together.”
