Summer Saturday in Mystic

Jack and I took advantage of art on our doorstep and spentseveral hours at the Mystic Art Festival (though not so long as to preclude a sail - #20 of the season; we may yet make our goal of 30 sails if the weather stays fair). It's been several years since I've been to this annual event and I was pleasantly surprised by both the quantity and quality of the art displayed. Apparently there were more than 250 participants with probably less than 50 displaying crafts and the rest painting or art photography or related genres. There were paints of every medium -- oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels, prints, etching, "thread paintings" (very fine embroidery stitches like brushstrokes) and so on, though I didn't see any pen and ink drawings -- and all sorts of subjects, ranging from animals, to fruit, to landscapes to portraits to boats to .....a painting of waterlilies that looked just like the one I found on the internet to use as a model for one of design assignments last winter.

I especially enjoyed the collages and special effectswith photographs, and talked with many artists about their work. Almost everyone had a page on the walls of their booth along with the

artwork giving details of their process, which made viewing the work more interesting. I had deliberately left my wallet in the car so I could not even be tempted to buy something - and, truth be told, there wasn't anything I just HAD to have. It was enjoyable, of professional quality, but suitable for regional rather than international audiences.

The highlight for me was meeting Brett Swanson, a comic artist and author (aka graphic novelist). I even borrowed $5 from Jack for one of his books! His studio is in New London, and he said he went to cartoon

school to learn the craft. I also learned about a digital printing service that takes jpeg files and turns them into a comic book. Maybe I'll have need of this service once my magnus opus is completed!

The show gave me an opportunity to experience the paintings (generic for all media) through Dewey's concepts (as best I can understand them from my reading.) The subjects were realistic enough that I did not need to ponder what the artist "meant"- I could just enjoy the way in which I perceived the gestalt of the composition, and through reading and talking with artists about their process I could appreciate the technical/thinking process that was necessary to achieve the end result. I realized which ones engaged me emotionally, providing an aesthetic experience, and which were merely pleasant to view. I'm eager to work on the "art" frame for my next "chapter" in my graphic novel, but first I must knuckle down to some serious Digital Measures sorting out of the data entry field selections for generating output report AACSB Table 2-1. (I hope I've lost you here. No one in their right mind should be concerned about such matters.)