CEArts is pleased to showcase information about the 47th annual 4th Street Art Festival (Bloomington, IN) to help promote the fantastic Labor Day Weekend arts event!
New Artists Bring their Fine Art and Craft to the 4th Street Art Festival with Stories of Inspiration, Technique, and Life as Artists, Makers, Teachers, & Businesspeople
The annual 4th Street Art Festival will return to Bloomington, IN on 4th Street between Lincoln St. and Indiana Ave. on Labor Day weekend, September 2-3 from 10-6 on Saturday and 10-5 on Sunday. The iconic event, now in its 47th year, is one of most beloved, looked-forward to events in Bloomington’s art and culture calendar. Typically, in any given year, at least a third of the juried artists are displaying their work at 4th Street for the first time. This allows the attendees to connect with their favorite artists and to discover new work and meet the people who create it. This year is no different.
Four of this year’s new artists, from various Indiana communities, are painter Taylor Walker of Carmel (Taylored Illustration), potter Kelly Meska of Bloomington (Meska Pottery), jeweler Heidi Mandich of Indianapolis (My Champagne Creations), and wood turner Samuel Dean of Whitehall (Little Flock Woodworks). While each artist has their own genre and techniques, they all share a passion for creating art and making things, a love for detail and teaching, and all are committed to experimenting, continually learning and perfecting their art, and are well-tuned into the business aspects of making a living with their art.
Taylor Walker is an expressionist painter who is passionate about animals and focuses on them in her work. Her goal is to blend technical ability and photo realism with exaggerated rainbow color and strokes to create emotion. She says, “Neutrals don’t register in my brain. Purple is my black. Green is my neutral. I want my work to be colorful, but not childish; I make it OK to be colorful as an adult.”
As a young artist, she just started doing art shows last year, meeting other artists, and joining the volunteer art show committees. Shows are thrilling to her. “Such a rush,” she says, “and as an emerging artist, I need to be in front of people. I’ve wanted to be a full-time artist my whole life. There’s no option but to be all-in. I’m in!” In addition to her commitment to selling her work at shows, she teaches painting through online videos she makes for Painting to Gogh.
Kelly Meska has been a potter for 25 years, and has also been an art teacher most of that time. Since moving to Bloomington three years ago, she devotes her time exclusively to creating functional ceramics with non-traditional looks and uses. Kelly uses a mix of throwing, altering, and hand-building in her pottery, and cuts original, mostly nature-based designs into linoleum that she imprints into the clay of her hand-built work.
She takes pride in being very picky about the design of her mugs, getting the weight, size, and feel just right, as well as adding details that make them more unique. She loves doing shows, where customers can pick up each mug and find one that feels right to them, while hearing about her involved, multi-step process, which usually surprises them.
“I was not an artist or a teacher by trade,” says jeweler Heidi Mandich, “I took my first metalsmithing class at the Indianapolis Art Center in 2006, and did my first show a year later.” Soon, she was teaching metalsmithing at the art center, and realized that she loved both, which helped spur her into early retirement after an advertising and sales career. Heidi’s two unusual techniques are quilling with metal and torch painting titanium. As a poor conductor of heat, titanium makes a satisfying medium for painting, so that you can lay one color down next to another without changing the first one. “You’re still not in charge of the color,” she says.
Admiring paper quilling, Heidi wondered, “Can I make that in metal?” She discovered, “Yes, but it’s not as cooperative!” In addition to the challenge of quilling with metal, she likes figuring out how to put the clasp in front of a piece by working it into the design. She says, “the clasp always ends up in front anyway. I just put it there, and make it the focal point.”
While he made his living until recently in engineering, metal fabrication, and sales, Sam Dean has been a woodworking hobbiest for 35 years. His father had a woodshop where he would make sculptures, carvings, and furniture. The wood lathe was one tool his dad didn’t use, making it available for Sam to practice with. Recently, Sam had an opportunity to change direction in his career path, he thought, “What do I like to do? I like to make things!” He also likes to give new life and purpose to reclaimed materials and downed trees. Since it takes one year of drying for each inch of thickness, the process for making his perfectly round bowls requires patience. After the first rough turn, a bowl can take 6 months to 3 years of alternating between wood turns and periods of sitting on a shelf to dry.
The opposite is true of his little mushrooms that he wants to warp for a whimsical look — he turns those with green wood. As a bonus, the redbud, locust, and walnut that he turns into mushrooms also happen to glow green, yellow, and purple under a black light.
These four artists are just a handful of the 100+ artists in 2D, ceramics, fiber, glass, jewelry, painting, photography, sculpture, and wood, who will line 4th Street over Labor Day weekend, eager to talk with patrons about their work, their inspiration, and techniques. Whether for a couple hours or the entire weekend, art lovers are encouraged to soak in the beauty of the designs and artisanship, and to connect with the stories of the people who create them.
More information: 4th Street Art Festival.