Art-A-Fair welcomes crowds back with ‘modern,’ engaging approach
With a new board in place, Laguna Art-A-Fair is in the early stages of its first summer art festival season with fresh leadership at the helm.
The board had a vision to modernize its grounds, and it has been well received by artists and art patrons alike.
Among the changes, Art-A-Fair reconfigured the setup of its booths, transitioning to a more open pattern that moved on from the labyrinth-like path that once greeted its guests.
“We started off by reconfiguring the booths, giving it a nice open-airy look,” said Robert Ross, president of the board for Art-A-Fair. “When you come in now, you can look straight back in a number of aisles, all the way up and down the show, from front to back.
“You get a pretty good view of everything, which makes people very happy. You can walk in, you can see what you’re looking for, where you want to go. You’re not trapped in like a maze.”
Festival leaders said approximately 2,000 people showed up to premier night for this year’s Art-A-Fair.
Attendees have also found access to various forms of entertainment, and there is now food on site at the festival’s reopened restaurant, Seven7Seven at Laguna Art-A-Fair. Chef Leo Bongarra is heading the eatery.
The festival brought back its dance floor and is offering dance lessons. Ross was swayed to showcase his talents in merengue with the assistance of a professional instructor.
“They dragged me on, and I actually had fun doing it,” said Ross, who said his dance partner covered his mistakes with her grace. “You get a little embarrassed in front of everybody, but it turns out I guess it wasn’t too terrible. The instructor there was so wonderful that they just made it comfortable and fun.”
Art-A-Fair has also brought in live musical entertainment, and those visiting can sign up for a whole host of workshops led by festival artists. Offerings range from jewelry making to photo editing and from working with acrylics to water colors.
As the workshops suggest, the artworks on the ground do not lack variety. Karo Kouyoumjan, an Armenian artist who has lived in the Los Angeles area since 1978, put up one of the more unique booths with a bounty of wire sculptures.
Kouyoumjan’s work featured likenesses of several sports figures, including basketball player Stephen Curry, boxer Evander Holyfield, tennis player Serena Williams and a couple of soccer players with the ball at their feet. It also included a Cadillac, which Kouyoumjan said took a few hundred hours of manipulating the wire to produce.
“What I like to capture in my art is capturing motion,” Kouyoumjan said. “I have Serena Williams, she is doing a backhand. … [The bicycle kick figure], the soccer ball is just a little bit away from his foot because he’s already kicking it, or it’s right there to kick. That’s your imagination to think about it. I like to portray action.”
Kouyoumjan added that he took some pieces he had prepared into a Laguna Beach art gallery a few years ago. On that trip, he ran into another artist who suggested he bring his pieces to the Art-A-Fair. That encounter led to him being juried into the show.
Ian Nyquist, a watercolor painter, is showing his work at Art-A-Fair for the first time. With an array of coastal subjects, annual bike trips with friends have served as an inspiration for him.
A section of his booth featured smaller, square creations with sea creatures such as jellyfish, starfish and seahorses. Another depicted Yosemite Falls.
“I call them gratitude projects,” Nyquist said, who hails from the San Francisco Bay Area. “For about a year, once a week, any time I had a friend or even a stranger who would do something that just kind of made my week, then I would sit down on the weekend and say, ‘OK, I’m going to paint them a painting. They’re not expecting it. I’m just going to do something that’s either related to what they did for me or something that I know that they would like. …’
“By the time that I did get juried in, I did have some of those done, although I did the sea ones, the seahorses and the jellyfish as companion pieces for the seascapes.”
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