Jennifer Waelti-Walters is a printmaker from Victoria, B.C., Canada. Before she turned to art she was a professor of French literature at the University of Vancouver. This year for the first time she took the bold decisión to pack up her prints and take them to Madrid's international print fair, ESTAMPA, where she was, by the way, extraordinarily successful. These notes on Madrid, the Spanish people and the fair are extracts from her notebook which she has very kindly offered us for publishing here.

Jenny attends Madrid clients with her "six words of Spanish."

Shiny Shoes and Faces on the "Metro"
Same for a society where everybody is elegant (or outrageouly, stylishly funky) and has polished shoes instead of runners. I noticed the shoes particularly on the metro. I love looking at faces on subways. The first time I went to New York I saw facial types I'd never seen before. In Paris there is a wonderful array or beautiful African faces. In Madrid I found myself sitting opposite faces from El Greco and Velázquez and Goya, and a whole selection of Inca and Mayan faces.

I saw only two black people and only one busload of Japanese... very different demography. In our ecologically correct Canadian society nobody wears furs and very, very few people smoke. I admired the furs and the glorious boots, was startled that people were wearing them when it was 11 degrees Celsius outside, and was cross that my feet are too big to buy funky shoes in Spain!

Where to Find a Bad, Smoky Bird Sandwich
The sandwiches in the Estampa cafeteria were bad, the tea cups way too small and I nearly choked on the smoke, so I brought food from
my local cafe after a day or two, because I wasn't prepared to sit by myself for the time it took to eat a three-course meal of I didn't know what it was going to be until it arrived! The lack of a proper break made the day feel very long some days.

I was bothered by the fact that there were birds flying about and a lot of bird song. It took me a couple of days to realise that the chirping came from one of the installations and that there weren't many birds in the building at all. I did worry about their survival, nonetheless.

Artists, Gallery Owners
I found the artists in Estampa very friendly, the galeristas more aloof, as one might expect. I saw some wonderful work and it was great to have it all in one place. I was surprised, and delighted that my work attracted interest. I would have been even more pleased if I hadn't had a bad cold which left me feeling too rotten to react fully. The take-down was brutal and it was a very good thing that Mike had a strategy
for us to cope and get out of there alive. Thanks again for that.

Madrid is handsome, noisy and polluted and the people are, in my experience, friendly and helpful. I never thought I'd go to Paris and
find it quiet and its air fit to breathe, but that's how it felt when I got there after Madrid. No wonder I got a cough.

The Accommodations
The hostal I stayed in reminds me of Cocteau´s ¨Beauty and the Beast.¨ Very ornate, somewhat run down and NO PEOPLE. I´ve been there 10 days. There are lights and sometimes voices behind doors late at night, everything I need is provided and I never see anyone. Actually today I did see the woman and arranged my departure, but that´s a first. I was begining to think I should have to leave money on the table and go.

Meanwhile, Back at Estampa
Now, back to Estampa. We, Maureen and Mike
(neither of whom realised, I suspect,what it would be like to have a mute helper) and I started hanging on Wednesday at 5:00 pm. We
stopped about 10 and continued on Thursday with just enough time to dash home and change and return for the 5:00 p.m. opening. Then we were on 5:00-9:00 p.m. Thursday, 11:00 a.m. till 9:00 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The show was in a conference centre and there were about 120 stands: The National library, paper makers, press and tools sellers (the stand next to us had a half a dozen models of presses and more tools and aids than I´d ever dreamed of. It looked like a surgeon´s supply store.) and galleries of all sizes and levels of importance.

Lifetime of Prints, Emotional Roller Coaster
I reckon I´ve seen more prints than I would normally see in a lifetime and my work has been seen by more people than would see me in a lifetime in Victoria. It´s a real emotional rollercoaster watching people look at your stuff comment and buy elsewhere, or enthuse and walk off, or pull a long face, then come back and buy. I was a bit the ¨flavour of the week¨nobody had seen stuff like mine, so they stared and gesticulated and brought other peoiple to look and asked me to explain (in my six words of Spanish) and they didn´t get it. I finally realised why: they had no concept of working on on a ¨dirty¨plate.

Anyway I talked to lots of printmakers and sold a goodly amount to the Madrileños. Not only that, but a woman who is opening a new gallery in the center of Madrid has taken all the remaining framed pieces and I´m off to have lunch with her. So the transport-all-that-framed-stuff-back-to-Victoria problem is solved.

But then there was the fearsome take-down. Starting at 9:00 p.m. last night, we all queued for the ONE service elevator and the loading bay. Mike strategised nicely and we were first in line for the elevator and about number 20 in the van line so we were out of there, exhausted and so sweaty that we steamed up the van, by about 10.30. The line of vans waiting their turn was down past the metro...they might still be there. All in all, it was quite an experience.