Talk about Art Play

[caption id="attachment_2686" align="aligncenter" width="300"] An Art Show in Hudson[/caption]

This weekend Hudson was the scene of an art show at the edge of town.  At least a hundred tents were set up and all sorts of artists were displaying their work.  It's always nice to see what people can come up with and they certainly come up with a lot.

Many people were displaying pictures and paintings, serious and silly ones, using all sorts of methods - water color, pen and ink, oil, photography, computer generated designs...  Some work was framed and some work was not.  There were cards galore for those of us who write letters.

I love to watch each artist talking to perspective customers.  This is just as interesting to me as checking out the art they've created.  I like to imagine them at work in their studio, lost in their craft.  What fun they must have and what satisfaction if their work is not only appreciated by the public, but also purchased.

And it's not only paintings I saw at the art show in Hudson.  There was plenty of  jewelry, ceramics, dried flower designs, lamps made out of bottles, sweaters made out of alpaca yarn.  People don't just sit around.  They get busy exercising their creativity.  Do you?  But so much to pack and set up for display at shows like the one I attended today and some of the art is  very fragile, like these glass ornaments.  You know it's a labor of love making these things, but an even greater labor of love  getting them to market.

I'm always most enchanted with the unusual items I see, like this wall hanging above.  Talk about using creativity to make something fun and new out of old rejected material.

Would you have thought to collect outdated license plates in order to cut them apart, reassemble them, and turn them into fun and artful hangings?  This artist was using his imagination all right, and he was exercising his creativity.  His work seemed to be a big hit with many shoppers too. I know I liked it a lot!  Seeing art like this makes me wonder what treasures I'm throwing away, treasures that could be recycled and turned into art.

Art shows are not about buying things we need.  They're about buying things that strike our fancy.  How about a snazzy hat?  In a perfect world we should all have a budget set up to provide us with plenty of spending money for spontaneous purchases.  I'm sure all the vendors at today's art show would agree with me.  If this were the case, whenever we'd spot an item that we appreciated we could buy it and make ourselves happy and make the artist responsible pretty happy too.

If I had  a 'fru fru' budget set up I would've purchased these two copper frogs to be of service around  my garden. If you look closely you can see one is holding a tray for drinks and the other is holding an ice bucket. How much would you pay for these little fellas?  You know they must have been a lot of work to make, and talk about the skill involved.  Well the two little frogs (really not so little) were selling for $1000 - that's for the pair of them, and you'd have to buy both.  How could you split them up? They're a team.

I give all the artists I saw today a lot of credit and that goes for all artists everywhere.  It's wonderful to have "your thing", something you love to do, and will do, even if there's little money in it.  Do you have such a thing?  Letter writers like me enjoy creative work with paper.  This may be small scale art compared to copper frogs serving cocktails, but whatever our creative work - it's all good!

So hurrah for art play and for artists everywhere.   No matter what form that art play takes, large or small, complicated or simple, practical or playful, lucrative or not, art play is an activity of joy, and art shows are a place where that joy is shared, and you know what I always say about sharing...

Sharing doubles the joy