Part Two of the Street Fair Stuff

A week after Custer's Last Stand (scroll down a couple of posts if you need a refresher), Evanston holds its Fountain Square Art Festival. Fountain Square is right in the heart of downtown Evanston, and the art festival is one of the jewels in Evanston's street fair crown. I wrote up last year's festival--you can find it in the archives--and this year I headed there on the last Saturday in June to take it all in.

But first, just for my pal Barb...
Ah, the Funnel Cake. Staple of street fairs the nation over--maybe even the WORLD over. But I am proud to say that I withstood temptation and refused to partake of the sugar-dusted confection.

There were a variety of arts and crafts that spanned the spectrum from incredibly expensive original oil paintings to fun stuff to hang in a window on a patio. Here are some "tree earrings" I thought were sufficiently sparkly to whet my magpie's appetite.
I love the autumn hues.

My favorite stuff, though, was, as last year, the guy who made funky creatures and busts out of old found household objects. Here's the tent:

And here are a few closer glimpses of his handiwork:
Some masks,

some cool heads,

and these strange creatures. How I would love to purchase some of his work! Maybe one day. Maybe next year!

This year I picked up a card from his tent, so I can reveal that this funky finery is the brainchild of Steve Meadows of S. D. Meadows Folk Art Gallery in Palestine, Illinois.

I made one purchase at the festival, and that was this woodblock print from Marvin and Wendy Hill that I have coveted since last year:

A few years ago, I purchased a very cool piece from Marvin and Wendy at this self-same show. Since then, though, Marvin has passed away. His wife Wendy is keeping his art and his memory alive, though, by continuing to print, color, mat, and frame his woodblocks. I just love his stuff!

And look what else was at the art festival:
The soft-serve ice cream booth! Yay and yum!

Alas, just as with the fair at Main and Custer the previous week, the weather stepped in to wreak havoc. About a half hour after I returned home, there was a scary blast of wind followed by an intense thunderstorm. But the wind--I've never experienced anything like it. According to news reports, it was 65 miles an hour. And it wasn't just a quick, intense whoosh. It lasted for fifteen seconds or more and it sounded like freight train, with doppler effect and everything. It tore limbs off the trees all up and down our street (a major thoroughfare), and it apparently devastated a large part of the Fountain Square Art Festival. Here's a entry from an eyewitness's blog. I only hope that the artists who lost so much were adequately insured. Still, it's hard to lose work that represents so much imagination, effort, and time.

Next Evanston fair up is not really a street fair at all, but the Evanston Ethnic Arts Festival in Dawes Park. That's next week. I love this fair. I hope we can make it this year. If we do, and if the weather cooperates, I'll provide some pictures and commentary!

Summer's Here and the Time Is Right...

For art fairs in the streets!


Which of course mean lots of food vendors. This picture is expressly for Barb, and she knows why!

Because we live so close to Evanston, almost all of our street fair-going of a summer takes place up there. At the end of June, we hoofed it up to Main Street and Custer for Custer's Last Stand. It's not so much an art fair as a boisterous street fair with lots of arts, crafts, and geegaw vendors:


Oh yeah. And food vendors galore!

See, Barb? EVERYONE had funnel cakes for sale!

We opted for less ostentatious fare--Jeff got some satay from a Thai food vendor, and I indulged my inner Cajun fille with some red beans and rice from these good folks:


Among the food stalls, this incongruity caught my eye:

The sacred flag of the Old Dominion, flying proudly over an Illinois street fair! And the vendor wasn't even selling ham biscuits. The stall purveyed Pan-Asian vegan food! Go figure.

After strolling around and perusing the wares,

(Hubba, hubba! Spicy, indeed!) we gave in to the siren song of the soft-serve booth.


Alas, one cannot always control the weather, for that very afternoon (once we had made our way safely and mostly dryly home) the skies opened.


And they spewed forth dime-sized hail!


I know it's nothing at all like the hailstorm my cyberpal Anne Marie experienced several months ago--we didn't have to replace the roof, for example!--but it was not the kind of weather anyone would want to be caught in strolling around or manning a booth at a street fair!

This is getting kinda long, so I'll save the pictures of the following week's street fair for the next post. See you there!

Fall Foliage Festival Art Show, 2007

Well, there it is: the Main Street portion of the Fall Foliage Festival Art Show in lovely downtown Waynesboro, VA! This is one of the big events of the year for the big W, what with lots of local and regional talent displaying and selling their wares. There was everything from hot air balloon windchimes...



to stained glass panels...



to sporty verdigris frog statuary...



to the ubiquitous and much-loved funnel cakes.



Barb and Charlie? We have funnel cakes! Heh.

As you can see, it was a lovely day--more summery than fall-like, though. What with temperatures that just wouldn't dip below the 70-degree mark, this portion of the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley had yet to sport much fall color, even in the midst of October. Lee and I walked from my mom's house in the lesser tree streets the mile or so to the festival, and we soon had to doff our jackets, the sun was so warm and unrelenting. And then, when we got to the festival, we were met with THIS odd sight, smack dab in the middle of downtown--not fall foliage but TROPICAL foliage!



That huge-ass palm-looking thing (look at me, ma! I'm a botanist!) would have never been able to even grow that big over a Waynesboro summer twenty years ago, much less still be thriving in the middle of October.

Ah well... it was warm enough that Lee and I enjoyed al fresco dining in the food concession area (he had a kind of Chicken Satay thingy, although it was being touted as "Chicken on a Stick," and I had an Andouille sausage), followed by yummy, hand-cranked ice cream at the SNACK concession area. Believe me, the pumpkin pie ice cream was to die for!

The wonderful Ed Brownlee was there yet again this year, he of the colorful and amusing ceramics...



Here are some more of his wares:



I love the little box bedecked with eyeballs! Stay tuned to see what I bought from him...

We ran into pals Beth and Barb (and Cortney and Charlie), PLUS Beth's daughter Erin and son-in-law Ben were there with their daughter Anya and their teeny new son Adonis... um, I mean, Elliot...in tow. Here's a picture of three generations, plus a doting auntie (L-R: Erin, Anya, Barb, and peeking over, just visible, is Beth):



Speaking of generations, Barb and Beth's mom, Patsy, was also exhibiting. If you look back over last year's account of the art show, you'll know that I bought an original watercolor from her. This year, another original caught my eye, but, alas! This one was just too dear. Still, here it is... there's some glare on the glass that obscures the depth of color, but trust me. This is lovely:



On Sunday, I took my mom to the art show, mostly so she could socialize. She made a beeline to Patsy's booth...


(That's Mom on the right, Patsy on the left)

Which gave me a chance to run over to Ed's booth and purchase a couple of cool things: a pitcher with the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities on it for Jeff (who is a Dickens fan) and pot decorated with a cactus-shaped alien, a sock, and so forth (it looks great on the new table in the sunroom):



I also bought a print of Patsy's called Along the Skyline Drive. This picture doesn't do it justice, but you get the general idea.



So, it was a lovely art show--and one I hope to attend for many years to come.

Next up? A look at a very weird display at the Waynesboro Heritage Museum, where Lee and I took refuge from the sun for a moment or two...

The Arts in Evanston

Last weekend was the Fountain Square Arts Festival in Evanston, our very near neighbor to the north (as in four doors and a cemetery north). The main downtown intersection of Sherman and Church is blocked off, and a host of artists show up to sell their work. It's a nice show (although I really do think that Waynesboro's Fall Foliage Festival Art Show has more variety and just as high quality--see posts for October 2006 for more info), but I really think they have too many photographers touting Kodachrome enlargements of Chicagoland points of interest. There was a lot of other stuff, too, but too many "local interest" photos on offer.

I snapped pictures of a couple of my favorite booths; you can see a detail of one of Aberant Art's works to the left, in all its Willendorfian splendor. This artist takes images from popular culture and art masterpieces and throws them together in amusing collages. Here's another one:



Some of the highlights of the show were the photographer with ultra-saturated photos of Chinese landscapes; the cool and rather creepy woodcuts of the late Marvin Hill (I bought one of his woodcut prints, Trinity of the Sea, several years ago at this self-same show); and the very cool Weener Ware, tiny pop culture images behind clear resin framed in bottle caps and made into jewelry. But the best in show for me were these whimisical objets d'art, fashioned from discarded "objets":



Aren't they cool?

Here are some more for your admiration:



And my favorite...



I just love the color; the flat, yet fluted "hat;" and, above all, the red shades. Alas, too much for my rather thin wallet.

And while we're on the subject of art and art shows, I never got around to posting a picture of the painting I bought at the Fall Foliage Festival show last October... and I promised to. Here it is, a lovely watercolor by Patsy Spilman:



I love the colors, and it reminds me of the banks of the little brooks one finds in my faraway Blue Ridge Mountains. It now hangs in the dining room, opposite the china cabinet and over the sideboard.

Evanston has lots of great festivals over the summer--coming up are the Ethnic Arts Festival in July, which I hope we can make, and the Lakeshore Arts Festival in August, which we will not make this year because we'll be in Marfa for Rachel and Chase's big ass party. And, of course, there are the fireworks on July 4th--just a few days away!

I'll close this post with another picture of the found objets. Look! One of them is waving! Or rising...