First, a warning: most of the stuff that I took pictures of is sculpture. I think it’s a bit impolite to bring a camera into a tent with a bunch of paintings and shoot pictures of the stuff that they’re trying to sell. For all of these pictures, I tried to ask permission from the artist before shooting. In some cases I wound up talking to whoever was managing the booth, so if you’re the person who made these beautiful things and you don’t want the pictures posted here, just let me know and I’ll remove them.
On the other hand, if you’re the artist and you’d like me to link the pictures to your website, I’d be perfectly happy to do that as well.
I’m gonna start this off with the obligatory picture of the giant fruit sculptures.
There. Just the thing to give to your friend who has a phobia of genetically modified food.
The wandering about started near the Law School. Just across from there, near the roadblock was this happy-go-lucky fellow.
I’m pretty sure he was standing guard, making sure that nobody drove up the street and into the booths.
On the off chance that anyone got past the initial guard, this guy was waiting in the little plaza near Ulrich’s bookstore.
I assume it would leap out and truss up any interlopers before finishing them off with its huge metal fangs.
Speaking of huge metal fangs, the same guy who did the cranky warrior and the giant spider had a set up down the road with a couple of other critters.
It looks nice and soft though. Go ahead and pet it… Ok, maybe not. The fur is made from nails, and if you rub him the wrong way, you might find yourself looking for a few miles of gauze.
There’s a big metal bison too.
And as the guy on the left is about to discover, feeding it is not a good idea.
Sure, it’s not a carnivore, but something that big and made out of metal isn’t likely to notice if a finger or two gets mixed in with the grass clippings.
Compare that to this fellow, who looks like he’s just WAITING for someone to get their hand into chomping range.
He’s even carrying around a grill, just in case…
You know, I was trying to figure out some kind of awful story about fish people, land-sushi, and the dangers of eating undercooked food, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the interested reader.
I love metalwork. It’s not just the huge statues, even some of the more abstract stuff looks cool.
This, for example, has a flowing liquid appearance… A lightness that might make you forget for a moment that it’s sharp, weighs a ton, and if it falls over on you they’ll need to take multiple trips to bring all of you to the hospital.
On the other hand, this thing is a lot lighter than it looks.
It spins in the wind, with the inside spiral moving in the opposite direction from the outer one! It’s almost hypnotic… And yes, the image is a link to a movie. You’ll need Quicktime, if you don’t have it.
I’m a huge fan of glass too.
It was a lovely sunny day, so the glass blowers and crystal shapers were really able to show off their stuff.
Can you imagine having something like this growing in your garden? My only worry would be that, on some dry sunny day, it’d act like a magnifying glass and you’d come home from work to a smoking plot of bare dirt.
On the other hand, it is beautiful. I love the way that a good glass artist can play with light.
Then again, you can do interesting things with light even when you’re working with wood.
These are some of the warmest looking lamps I’ve ever seen. The wooden shades are turned on a lathe… They’re amazingly thin.
I’m gonna wrap this up with a couple pieces of ceramic art that I really liked.
This guy is roughly the same size as a biggish housecat, but much heavier. On the plus side, he’s easier to feed and clean up after.
I think this is supposed to be an incense burner of some type. I just like it because of this guy…
There’s a snake eating his head!
The art fair is around until Saturday, and this is just a small selection of things that caught my eye. Go and see it if you can… Tomorrow I’ll post pictures of the stuff that we got.