Great Lakes Art Fair

For the second art encounter I attended the 2014 Great Lakes Art Fair in Novi, Michigan. It was a short 1 hour drive for a great experience that I will tell my family about for weeks to come. This art fair reminds me of the Black Swamp festival that is in Bowling Green every year. There was art vendors as far as the eye could see. I enjoyed my time there looking at all different kinds of art, from the more contemporary styles, to classical works of art that looked as if they were taken from museum floors. The show consists of 200 artist displays, and includes free access to decorated gardens and a student art display as well. One of my favorite aspects of the festival was just the amount of art there was there. It was interesting seeing artists make pottery by hand, and showing off their tapestries that some of which took years to complete. It was really amazing to see these things, and to see how close and similar their techniques were, as to what we learned in class. Another thing that amazed me at the fair was the glassblowing demonstrators. Glass blowing has always been something that interests me. It was so cool seeing these people take molten globs of glass, and turning them into amazing bowls, vases and abstract works of art. It was really amazing to see some of the tapestries that these artists had worked on. In some cases their designs looked extremely similar to the sample projects that we had just finished. It was really cool to see what they did, and see the correlation between stitches and weaves, and to understand which ones that had done on their pieces.
By far one of my favorite parts of the adventure up to Novi was the paintings and hand drawn works of art. I am a sucker for pencil and coal drawings and some of the works of art there were fantastic. It always amazes me to see someone turn a white piece of paper into a black and white realistic photograph of something in their minds. This one gentleman in particular had crafted large drawings of dogs, and other animals. He used a regular ball point pen, and created works of art that in my opinion rival some of the best drawings in museums today. The detail and drawing techniques he used made it look as if the animals were popping of the page. His drawings had so much live in them, it was if you could take the dog out of the picture and it would come to life. It amazes me to see just normal people with such talent at art fairs like this. When relating the Black swamp art festival, to this festival it amazes me to see how many local artists we have in this area, but in the country as a whole.
I would recommend this art fair to anyone interested in all types of art. There was sculptors who were working with wood, and stoneware and even sand. This festival has something for everyone. I typically am not very in to the whole art scene, but this place really kept my interest. It was really fun going from booth to booth and kiosk to kiosk looking at these people work. I enjoyed looking at things especially with buildings and architectural elements drawn into the pieces. Being that my major is construction engineering, it was really interesting to me to see how these artists made the buildings the way that they did, and to see how spot on Architecturally speaking that these pieces were. I noticed that some builds in some of the drawings had elements that looked mid evil, and others that looked as if Frank Lloyd Wright had drawn them. It was a truly great experience, and it makes me even more excited to attend this even next year, as well as the black swamp festival in Bowling Green this year as well.
In conclusion, I had an amazing time at the Great Lakes Art fair in Novi, Michigan this weekend. I would recommend this event to any budding art enthusiast or even the hardcore art critique. It was really amazing to see how my art projects in this class related to these professional works of art, and how closely mine stacked up against them.