Utah Arts Festival

I volunteered at the AIGA booth tonight at the Utah Arts Festival. At the booth one could either buy a pre-made vinyl bag from recycled billboards around Utah OR make one themselves from a different no-sew pattern. I made one at the training meeting and they are pretty cool (when I was walking past the REI the other day I heard a 12 year old boy tell his friend it was the coolest bag he had ever seen. Yeah. The bags have those kind of credentials). So I recommend making one to any of you who might be on the fence about going to the festival.

After the huge rainstorm, I left the safety of the booth and wandered the festival. There was only one booth I cared about and I am IN LOVE. I almost never want to buy other artist's stuff. I've been working on trying to care about Art for Art's sake. I usually like things to be useful or personally meaningful. And maybe I'm just a sucker for this kind of stuff because there is typograpy on it but take a look at this:

Artist: Chris Roberts-Antieau
"fabric paintings" composed from freehand-cut cloth shapes, hung behind glass in hand-painted frames.


I dedicate this one to Becca, Amy and Jen:
This one with the beans on fire is what I wanted to buy:
They are all fabric applique with beautiful hand-painted frames. The really detailed ones are really huge. So amazing. Her son was the one manning the booth. He said it was the first time they had been to an art fair, they usually showed at galleries (ok, I was just listening to him tell some other ladies he was trying to get to buy some stuff). He is like 22 and was wearing gigantic old man farmer over-alls, I think just to make it seem small-scale, but the pants were were brand new looking, no manure stains on the knees, and I just read on the website that her work has been featured in Oprah's magazine. So they are doing just fine. I only wish I had at LEAST $600 I really didn't need so I could have a fabric painting of some lady burning beans hanging in my kitchen right now.