New art festival

Formerly Art in the Park, it’s at Patterson Park in the Glebe. We went on Saturday.

I liked the junk metal sculptures by Tick Tock Tom. Look at those typewriter teeth.

Here is Tom’s website:
http://ticktocktom.com

This is Steven Strang, my favourite painter from the show. This photo doesn’t show the paintings very well because they’re quite small, and he doesn’t seem to have a website. I liked them because they are so skillfully painted. They have the look of an early master like Hieronymous Bosch, very precisely drawn with an inner luminosity in the colours, and each of them embodies a joke — a clever idea or a pun — right in the title. Unfortunately I don’t remember any of the titles so I guess you just should have been there ;)

Another favourite was the Ottawa artist Andrew King, who I met. He is amazingly young to be so good. Or maybe he just looks young, I don’t know. He’s tall with red hair and a baby face. I couldn’t afford to buy a painting but he sells cards of his work for $7, so I got one of the 85 bus. Here it is.

This is Andrew King’s website:
http://www.andrewkingstudio.com

I don’t remember this woman’s name. She makes whimsical dolls with sculptural faces, like the one beside her in the picture. I thought she looked a little like one of her dolls, but she took off her glasses and put on a more serious expression for the photo, so that didn’t work out quite the way I expected it to. But I like the picture anyway.

Some others I liked but didn’t get pictures of:

Photographer David Taylor. He is a professional portrait photographer, but I like his fine art prints best… the kind that he was showing in the park.

Illustrator Ryan Macdonald. He says he’s in process of moving to Ottawa because he always feels so welcome here.

Paul Sharp, who understood that it was a compliment when I mentioned how odd his people look.

Louis Helbig. He shoots pictures of the tar sands from a light airplane. The sands have a terrible beauty when seen from above. He will be featured at the Ottawa City Hall art gallery this summer.

Oh, lots of others. I saw some good photography but I love to look at painting the best. I wish I could be a painter but I don’t know a thing about it, or whether I’d have any talent for it. Maybe someday I’ll take a course. We’ll see.

Here is a picture of the art show from 2008:
Pic 143
Art in the park

June 7, 2008

Bye for now!