Where the Boys Are - and the Girls, too!
or
Artfest!

My town had the annual artfest recently (an event which I heartily recommend for every single town in the nation), and it is one of the highlights of the year for my family. Artists and artisans set up their tents, local eateries put out booths and double their prices, and the town rents the a cappella group du jour for the weekend. There's a guy on stilts who takes care to dress as a cowboy and not a clown (our current age's scariest archetype), since freaked-out frightened little kids tend to automatically strike out at scary things within reach, a real hazard to stilt-wearers. Someone makes balloon animals. Once, they had a roving magician, but I think he made the jewelry artists nervous since he could clearly palm anything; I've not seen him since. The local Birds of Prey rescue mission shows up and displays the eagles and hawks they're nursing back to health after prying them off someone's fender or grill. The police show up and do their K-9 unit demonstration (which makes the artists who indulge in chemically enhanced inspiration a little edgy). They sell nice T-shirts. And, of course, there's beer for $5 a glass.

It occurred to me as I was perpetuating my endorphin rush by wandering from tent to tent, that artisans are the real artists anymore. Official, academically-sanctioned art is so pretentious, formless, and generally awful that no one outside of that particular circle of artists likes it, takes it seriously, or really pays any attention to the latest "found art" refuse sculpture or abstract smear of pigments intended to wake us up from our bourgeois trance. (Most twenty-year-olds who indulge in this illusion haven't even lost their mental baby fat, and yet they are supposed to shake the rest of us from our supposed daze. Like, puh-leeze, dude.)

Michael Blowhard once asked me via email about what I do out in the wasteland of Colorado to experience art since I moved from the art mecca of Minneapolis/St. Paul (though these are not his phrasings or implications, he's too polite for that, but is the basic gist). Well, for me, artisan fairs are the answer.

My two favorite artists whom I encountered this year are Bill Amundson and Padgett McFeely.

This is an example of Bill Amundson's drawings, and his site is here.


Amundson told me a great story when I chuckled at this particular drawing. And I paraphrase: "Yeah, that happens to be my most popular commission subject. Everyone wants me to put logos and stuff on tits. I say 'tits' by the way, even though it embarrasses me, because my girlfriend said that 'breasts' really belong to women - its such a serious grown-up word - but 'tits' belong to the world. So, she says I need to call them 'tits'. This one lady had me make one with tractors on the tits for her dad, because he likes tractors, and well, tits, of course. I think I've put every logo there is on tits..."

Naturally, he's a hoot.

Here is one of Padgett McFeely's hand-tinted photographs, and her site is here.


"Mountain Melody"

I wish I could retell her stories about where and how she found some subjects, and how she re-envisioned them, but those were mostly great in the telling, and I just can't do them justice.

However, both of these artists post their scheduled shows on their sites, so go find them yourself and hear their stories first hand.
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As an added bonus, check out this great essay by the Blowhards regarding art and stuff.

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Afterthought: Now I know that slamming mainstream/academic art and then posting a drawing of boobs (sorry Bill, I like "boobs" better) and a tinted photo is kinda cutting myself off at the knees, as they aren't "high art". I don't think the artists who produced those works would call them high art either - but they are art, regardless of their relative stature in the larger wash of things. It's just that art should contain the high and the low and everything in between. Here's the inbetween. And they pass my test: I would hang them on the wall with pride if I could afford them. So there.