Artistic Observations

So I was going to talk about Art in the Pearl, the annual display of very talented artisans in downtown Portland over Labor Day weekend. Their work is stunning. So creative, so detailed, so expensive. You can tell by looking at the finely crafted wood furniture and cleverly unique artwork that you can’t afford to have any of it in your house if you are like me.

One artist didn’t have prices on any of his work. He had these incredible martini glasses with drops of water on them that looked just like a photograph. He was explaining to people that there were NOT photographs, and that’s why they cost $3,000, because they were hand painted.

Everything we saw was gorgeous and intriguing – artwork to enjoy that would also impress your friends.

Contrast these with the artwork I saw at the Alberta Street fair a couple of weeks ago. Most of that art looked like psychedelics were involved. Bright colors swirled over canvas like a hurricane had passed through the artist’s studio. Most everything I saw was made with “hard” colors – I don’t know how else to describe them. They weren’t normal colors you’d see in anyone’s home. All those reds and yellows and royal blues fighting for real estate on the canvas without a theme was a torment to my eyes. They looked like children had been instructed to use as many colors as they could with no particular intention. The odd thing was that booth after booth had these kinds of paintings, as if the whole street had sent their kids to an “instant street fair” art class.

There were other weird pieces with hateful looking demons or weird creatures painted with blacks and touches of red. Who is going to buy such a thing besides Satan? Would you want to look at that over your mantel? They were totally creepy. If I had one of those things in my house and got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and saw it by the eerie glow of a nightlight, I’d have bad dreams the whole rest of the night.

The main difference between these two approaches to art boiled down to time invested. The artists at the Pearl looked like their work took hours and hours and hours to do. At Alberta Street, there couldn’t have been much more than one hour.

Another difference was price. Most everything at the Pearl appealed to me but was too expensive. Much at Alberta was unappealing but quite affordable.

Anyone very young and/or on drugs is going to take offense at what I’m saying here. They will say it’s a matter of taste, and I should be open to people’s artistic expression, and they’re absolutely right. It is true that my particular taste runs to things that would look good in an average home as opposed to things that look like they’d been drawn by someone in a third-world insane asylum.

But I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so I will end with the observation that I very much enjoyed looking at the artwork at Alberta and jabbing my husband in the ribs when I saw something particularly eye-wrenching, er, I mean eye-catching. This is one thing I like about Portland. You can find something for everybody around here – from the upper crust to the lowly heel with the fuzzy blue mold.

And if you have a taste for the bizarre – you’re in luck. You can pick up artwork for cheap – in many instances two for one, 35% off today only, or at a “street fair” special. And if you have some pot on you, you could probably get an even better deal than that.