Sawdust Art Festival
I went to the Sawdust Art Festival last Wednesday. For those of you who don’t know (meaning those of you who don’t live around here and even some of you who do), Sawdust is an awesome art festival where 200 Laguna Beach artists get together. Each artist has their own booth and the entire festival takes place within the Sawdust grounds, which are covered with – you got it – wood chips (heh, bet you didn’t get it. I guess they originally used sawdust, but nowadays they use woodchips).
There are a multitude of artistic endeavors on display at Sawdust Festival, something for everyone I imagine. I saw oil on canvas, glass sculptures, beaded jewelry, photography, mixed media, etc etc… oh, and gourd art.
Don’t you love that phrase? Gourd Art.
I don’t know who first thought to hollow out a gourd and decorate it (my guess would be Native Americans) but God (Great Spirit?) bless you, my fine friend. I love gourd art. There was an artist at Sawdust, Bette Bennett Lee, who could do some mad crazy things with a gourd. Give her a knife and a paintbrush and let her go MacGyver style (Bear Grylls style?). I’d have bought all of her Christmas ornaments if not for the fact that I had little money.* Plus, I’m trying to lay off on the Christmas ornament purchases now that my children are of school going age and will be bringing home gold painted dry pasta and the like.
I did purchase a couple handmade ceramic sculptures by Lupe Blanton – cute polka-dotted mushrooms for $7 apiece, one purple and one green – and put them in the rose garden. Little No Limit broke them today. Do you think if I had given her fourteen hundred pennies and told her to throw them one by one into a water fountain, it would have made the money last longer? Ah, well, serves me right buying something breakable AND colorful AND leaving it within her reach.
R.I.P. My mushroom friends
In addition to artists, the Sawdust Festival also has children’s booths where kids can paint and if a certain age, participate in spinning a pottery wheel. Because my children enjoy rejecting my suggestions in public, we did not partake in these fun activities for kids, but instead, they made mounds of woodchips and called them castles, took pictures at the little waterfall and listened to great live music, that included a man playing a bizarre V-shaped violin/fiddle type thing (that’s an actual music term).
All in all, we spent two and a half hours of fun filled art appreciation and left before either child threw a tantrum. I call that a good day.
*For the record, if money were no object, I’d have purchased the works of Vladimir Prodanovich for my living room, Laurel Meister for the kids’ room, Susan Dysinger for husband’s music room, and Becky Prelitz for my bedroom.
sawdust art festival
