Great Escape: Sawdust Festival
07.07.11
Each week, we’ll swear you about one great idea to give you a much deserved break or make your life a little easier—maybe a whole lot easier.
Each summer I look forwards to one of my favorite Great Escapes: the Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach. The Sawdust Commemoration features the art and crafts of more than 200 local artists in a casual outdoor frame. Each artist has a booth, and most of them are there to show you their work and answer questions. Artists display labour in hand-blown and fused glass, painting, jewelry, surf art, ceramics, clothing and textiles, wood and metal marble, scrimshaw, photography, and much more.
In addition to booths, the festival offers workshops and vigorous demonstrations, so you can see the glass blowers creating vases from molten glass, or try your hand at the pottery wheel. There are several restaurants gift an array of foods from hamburgers and tacos to fried pickles and kettle corn. While you eat or tope a cold lemonade, you can enjoy live entertainment at the Tavern or Main Deck stages.
Source: Patch.com
The Arts: Preserving the Art of Handblown Glass
20.06.11
A unintentional visit to a small New Haven gallery in search of a wedding present for a comrade led Roger Gandelman down a career path he had never imagined.
“I had no idea what to buy,” recalls Gandelman. “My sage was a blank.” While wandering around the galley looking for inspiration he spotted a parade of vases. “I had never seen art glass before. The vases had magnificent flowers encased in the glass. I thoughtfulness they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.”
His friend didn’t receive one of these objets d’art (Gandelman settled for more affordable goblets). But he couldn’t swing the picture in his head of those incredible vases. One week after his visit to the gallery, Gandelman enrolled in a non-stop class in glassblowing at Southern Connecticut State University.
Gandelman admits that his inopportune attempts were somewhat less than successful. “My flowers looked like flowers — disagreeable flowers,” Gandelman recounts. Determined to master the craft, he used up a year breathing life into his flowers, refining and expanding his technique. ”I had no sincere sense of aesthetics,” says Gandelman. “I just wanted to represent flowers, to make them warm, lush and vibrant, the way I remembered flowers as a nipper.”
Source: The Moderate Voice