They’re back. In Ocala and Gainesville and a thousand other little towns, the sidewalk art festivals have returned from a lengthy slumber, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, looking for a friend. These rites of Autumn---and later, Spring---wake up their communities, fill the streets with good cheer, revive the careers of starving artists living on bread and water, waiting for the angry tide to ebb.
The timing of the Fall fairs is splendid (Gainesville’s is November 6-7) with Christmas peeking over a not-too-distant fence, expecting to be asked in. You can find gifts from a dime to a dollar to a minor king’s ransom at these expositions, earrings small enough for an infant, paintings large enough to blot out the sun. Siobhan is a pottery fan who regrets Ken Jensen’s departure from kitchenware into strange musical instruments, while I am always eager to see John Moran’s latest photographs of local natural phenomena, especially portrayals of the many incredible nearby springs. It’s fun to see what new tricks the old regulars are up to but also to discover the work of the new kids in town.
There is always snobbery afoot which argues about the definition of Art. Is jewelrymaking Art? How about glass-blowing? Leatherwork? What about that nice lady who makes those clever chapeaus? We are liberal interpreters. We believe that Art is the application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form, which produces works that can be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. Everyone is invited to draw his or her own lines between who is an artist, who is a craftsman and who is a bleak impostor. Does the true artist sometimes suffer while the wretched charlatan thrives? Yes. This is America, remember, the land of exalted tchotchkes. Some day, somewhere, you will run across a horse made of hubcaps with an asking price of $10,000. Tread carefully---some hubcaps come from BMWs, others come from Yugos.
 |
(Above) Gary Borse of the Fairfield Mafia paints Old Florida in his Marion County studio. Not a festival exhibitor, Gary's work can be found in galleries across the state, including the Harn Museum in Gainesville, the Plum Contemporary Gallery in St. Augustine and The Oaks Gallery in Micanopy. (Below) Nature photographer John Moran in one of his beloved North Florida springs. Moran is a major advocate for the sorely pressed natural marvels, which need all the support they can get. He exhibits at both of Gainesville's major art festivals. |
Instruction Guide For Fairgoers
“Bargaining has neither friends nor relations.”---Benjamin Franklin
There is a time and a place for everything. You are expected to bargain with the automobile dealer, the serape salesman and the wholesale drug dealer, it’s all a part of the game. And when you do, a little refinement, please. There’s nothing uglier than the sight of wealthy Americans using their money as a cudgel to browbeat penurious Mexican seamstresses, Native American handicrafters and street fair artists, in search of a rare bargain. Proper negotiating requires perspective, cleverness, a sense of humor and, if I may, a little kindness.
I recall a serape salesman who camped outside our hotel in Oaxaca. He was always in a good mood, greeted us each day as we left to go about our business, welcomed us home each night, always mentioning the price of his products, which went down daily. I did not particularly want a serape even though these were top of the line, but as we were leaving for the final time, he walked up smiling and offered us his best serape at a pitiful price. I gave him what he asked for the first day, which was three times as much, not because I’m a nice guy but because I appreciated the way he played the game. Hell, he felt like an old friend by then and the money would do much more good in his pocket than in mine. My companion, Rick Nihlen, laughed and said, “Well, you both won. You got the price down to nothing and he got the money prize.” Exactly.
When you go to an arts festival, the purveyors are not selling bananas. They are putting forth the result of hours of invention, sweat and execution, products of their imagination and creativity. Verbally diminishing their bright little baubles to save yourself a few dollars is boorish, insensitive and unworthy of a good soul. Don’t do it. Discuss the work and subtly leave open the opportunity for the artist to suggest a lower price if you like, but don’t push it. If you are a person of means, don’t haggle at all, just pay the man or pass on by.
Sure, post-festival the object of your affection might be cheaper. Take a card and call later. And remember---you’re not buying something you can get at J.C. Penney’s, you’re often securing one of a kind. If you happen to visit a street fair on a bright sunny day with temperatures in the seventies and your favorite artist is thriving in his or her little booth, think of all the days when the rains roll in and the wind is blowing the tent down, all the inevitable cancellations and disappointments and plans disrupted because the expected profits blew down the street like tumbling tumbleweeds. Imagine how you’d feel if your employer didn’t send your check on a given week. And envision most of all how you’d feel sitting in the artist’s chair casting your pearls before swine and listening to the occasional shallow criticism of fools, a benevolent smile screwed onto your face. It’s okay, though, the artist thinks as he looks at his watch. That smiling millionaire with the big heart will show up any minute now.
 |
(Above) Judi Cain of Gainesville plies her trade at a local street festival. Once a familiar face at these affairs, Judi has recently opted to offer her work at galleries like Oak Hammock and Sweetberries in Hogtown and the Firehouse in Newberry. (Below) When he's not communing with the spirits or leading the nomad life, sculptor/painter William Schaaf can be found at his ancient carriage house studio in serene downtown MacIntosh. |
Pushing The Envelope
“If people aren’t calling you crazy, you aren’t thinking big enough.”---Richard Branson
Sometimes a simple canvas isn’t nearly big enough. Such was the case for Bulgarian artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff---“Christo” to you---who started relatively small, wrapping objects like cars and furniture in odd fabrics. As time went by, however, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude grew more ambitious. They covered 2.7 miles of walkways and jogging paths in a Kansas City park with saffron-colored fabric. They went to Miami and created the “Surrounded Islands,” encircling 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with brilliant pink woven polypropylene fabric, giving them the appearance of giant lily pads. A little funky at ground level but a spectacular sight from the skies. They installed 1,340 large, light-blue umbrellas in a rice field in Japan and 1,760 more in Southern California. The duo even covered the Reichstag in Berlin and 163 trees in Switzerland. Talk about your wrap artists.
Christo’s work was typically large, visually impressive and controversial, often taking years and sometimes decades to complete. Some people didn’t like it. “It’s not art, it’s insanity,” was a common reaction. Not from children, though. Kids though it was cool. It might be okay to be an artist after all if they let you go out and wrap the Arc de Triomphe. Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid for everything themselves, refusing grants, scholarships, donations or public money, financing the projects via the sale of their own artwork.
Throughout all the ruckus over his shenanigans, Christo was quick to dismiss lofty interpretations of his work, both kind and cruel criticisms and reviewers who assigned misplaced meaning to the projects. “It is nothing deep, nothing profound,” he scoffed. “it has no deeper meaning than its immediate aesthetic impact. It’s purpose is to bring joy, beauty and new ways of seeing the familiar. It makes me happy to look at it.”
Us, too, Christo. Through all the aggravation, you Kept On Wrappin’. That’s all a true art-lover can ask.
I Don’t Know Much About Art, But….
Niki de Saint Phalle is probably best known for her “Nanas”---totemic, colorfully painted sculptures of female forms. While these are giant celebrations of women, de Saint Phalle also defied 1960s conventions of femininity when she decided to use a most unusual device to make paintings. That would be a gun. Early in the decade, she began a series of “Tirs” or “Shooting Pictures,” affixing paint-filled plastic bags to canvases, then shooting them so they’d explode and drip pigment down the linen. Bullet holes remained, lending a rough violence and a sense of randomness and chance to the surface. De Saint Phalle left the plastic bags on the surface and often incorporated other elements (mesh, a metal seat, leaves) into her strange assemblages. The artist began wearing a white suit during her shootings and invited other prominent artists to wield guns themselves, turning her artmaking into a communal event. Anyone who took a shot and missed the painting was sent out for pizza.
After Lucien Smith graduated from Cooper Union in 2011, he began using a fire extinguisher to apply paint to canvas. The results, his “Rain Paintings,” are lightly speckled with blue, black, yellow and red drops. Abby Leigh’s paintings look like lovely constellations of flowing lines and circles, but step closer and the surfaces appear severely stressed. That’s because Abby smashed them with a sledgehammer. The artist likens each mark to a scar and the painting’s surface to a skin. To make the works, she layers wax, oil, pigment and paint atop dibond and then pierces, sands and otherwise assaults the material. In the late 1970s, Andy Warhol brought abstraction into his practice. To make his “Oxidation” series (1977-78), he first primed canvases with copper metallic paint, then he or his associates would urinate on the wet surface. The mixed materials catalyzed a chemical reaction: the surfaces developed a greenish, speckled topography. Collectors rushed to buy this work but a few haughty critics called it “piss poor.” Urinalysis techs, on the whole, seemed to like it.
November
Comes the morning chill now, the rainless days of pre-winter when the wardrobe changes here and nobody talks about going to the beach. Thanksgiving is waving at us from that hill in the distance, football season is getting mortally serious and Halloween candy is half-price. The changing weather leads to introspection, the morning light comes an hour earlier, we’re only a month from a morning freeze and only two from Christmas.
What have we done with this year….was it exciting and productive, did we gain traction with our efforts, are we having fun yet? What did we learn, what did we forget, who could use a little help? Those mistakes we made---how to avoid them next time ‘round? Are we on the right path, and if we’re not sure, how long do we follow this quirky trail? Have we considered all the possibilities and acted from strength or taken a blind stab at the golden ring?
What will we do now…what’s next? Will we bow to age and cede some dreams or take a step out onto the precipice? It’s awfully comfy under those covers at home but it’s hard to resist when Paris calls. Are we satisfied to be alone or are we still looking? What about this computer dating business---it seems to have worked for Roy and Sheila but Eddie wound up with a woman wanted by the law in eight states.
Every morning, I rise around 6:30, feed the horses at 7:00, then walk down our long driveway to the gate, sipping my lemon-ginger tea. I think about the things that need doing that day, other things that might be done and the best use of whatever time I have left over. I know there will be surprises, there always are. I reach the front gate, put my cup on a fence post and look out at the sky, the land nearby, the rare passing car on its jaunty way to somewhere. It’s a new day, another lovely gift. I can’t wait to gently take the wrapping off and see what’s inside.
That’s all, folks….
