It’s not easy to say goodbye to art festival
Sellers pack up wares to head home after the weekend bazaar
As the three-day Bayou City Art Festival wrapped up, the “huge ordeal” of packing up the wares that delighted 20,000 visitors is left to the artists themselves.
A concrete Buddha face leaned crookedly on a red metal dolly Sunday afternoon, its eyes closed peacefully despite some jostling. The tag on its smooth, gray cheek read “SOLD.”
Casey Bridges tucked a sheet of foam around his artwork so it wouldn’t get knocked around too much. Then the artist — who’d brought his sculpture and sacred stone garden art all the way from Grass Valley, Calif. — helped his customer roll the 2-foot-wide, 30-pound concrete countenance off toward the exit gate of the Bayou City Art Festival.
Plenty of unwieldy, heavy or delicate art was carted in and out of Memorial Park over the weekend. The Bayou City fest filled the park with about 300 artists, including sculptors and painters, photographers, glass blowers and jewelry designers. By Sunday afternoon, the three-day festival had brought in about 20,000 visitors, said Bridget Anderson, executive director of the Art Colony Association, which puts on the semiannual event.
Any bazaar that big requires some strategy and heavy transport.
“It’s a huge ordeal” to get the artists’ work in and out of the park, Anderson said. “We have forklifts in here and everything.” Setup last week was leisurely and spread out over three days, but when the festival’s over, it’s over: The artists all had to load up their work and get it out of the park before they left Sunday night.
“There’s a little chaos, but it’s organized chaos,” Anderson said. “We could be here till 11 or 12.”
Some of the biggest pieces
in the park were bronze sculptures by David R. Nelson. Nelson makes startlingly realistic, lifesize wildlife sculptures; one of his bronze cougars is installed outside the University of Houston football stadium. Those pieces weigh at least 250 pounds, Nelson said. He and his wife and son load them on a flatbed trailer and tie them down, one by one. They’re planning to head back to Marble, Colo. — not far from Aspen — on Tuesday, a three-day trip that requires vigilance to keep the sculptures from slipping.
Nelson does several art festivals a year, and so far nothing’s been damaged in transit. “But I’ve come very close,” he said. Once, after a tiring weekend festival, he didn’t get a life-size sculpture of a doe strapped in quite right. By the time he realized the piece was loose, “she was ready to go right off onto the freeway.”
The Nelsons don’t cover up the sculptures when they load them onto the trailer; the burnished bronze is weather-resistant, and a blanket flapping in the wind would only ruin the patina. So they get plenty of stares from people who pass them on the highway — and extra attention from people’s pets, who see the bronze menagerie and think they recognize their own kind. “If there are dogs in the car, they go wild,” Nelson said. “They’re jumping all over in the car.”
‘Your own cargo hold’
Artists with breakable pieces have all developed their own systems to help their work survive the trip.
“Lots of bubble wrap,” said Nicole McQuaid, a glass sculptor. “It’s magic stuff.”
She and her husband, Jason McQuaid, have been blowing and sculpting glass together for 22 years. For this festival, they packed individually wrapped glass pieces tightly into plastic totes, then drove two days from southern California with their fragile work bouncing behind them in a trailer.
Tom Januhowski has rigged up a way to keep his carved wood sculptures from getting damaged during transit. In the bottom of a cardboard box, he duct-tapes a few Velcro straps, which he then wraps around the piece to hold it in place. “You kind of make your own little cargo hold for it,” he said. “It’s not very high-tech, but it works.”
Even so, Januhowski — who came to the festival from Onalaska on Lake Livingston — won’t cart just any of his work to an outdoor festival. “I leave a lot of the delicate stuff at home,” he said. “I don’t even bring it.”
Late Sunday morning, Ganna Halvorsen stood before one of her paintings, a brush full of oil paint in her hand. She was dabbing her initials onto the bottom of a large landscape. “I only sign when I feel it’s finished,” she said.
But Halvorsen’s paintings seem wet even when they’re dry; she layers her paint thickly, with glistening, textured brushstrokes. Her canvases can’t rub up against each other, the Los Angeles artist said, and that makes traveling to festivals a challenge.
Halvorsen’s husband, a contractor, has outfitted her trailer’s walls with plywood panels so paintings can be secured with wires from the back.
“He’s had to become very inventive and creative,” Halvorsen said. “Sometimes he hangs them off the ceiling of the trailer.”
A stash of sculptures
At the booth with the Buddha faces, it was brisk business Sunday morning. With his stock running low, Bridges ran to his van to collect some more pieces to sell.
“It’s super chaotic in my van right now,” said the sculptor, pushing a cart of his work back through the park. Back at his booth, he opened a bottle of water.
Bridges planned to load up and leave Houston late Sunday night, headed for St. Louis, where an old high school friend allows him to store some sculptures in a corner of his garage. “Every time I come into the Midwest, I leave a little bit of work behind with him,” Bridges said. The next few weeks will find him at festivals in Texas, Minnesota and Nebraska, so leaving behind a stash of sculptures prevents him from crisscrossing the country in a van at its weight capacity.
Back in California, Bridges is in business with his mom, who’s also a sculptor. She handles the finances and manages the website, he said, wiping sweat away from his forehead. “And I do all the traveling and heavy lifting.”