An affair of the art

“Everybody has a niche,” said Marjorie (“Marge”) Kinney, an exhibitor at the Art-A-Fair festival.

With personalities and stories as diverse as the works they create, the festival’s exhibitors come from all over the county, country and world to participate in the only international juried art festival in Laguna.

Some come for family; others, to teach. The festival even gave one man a second chance at life.

Scott Sutton, a watercolor artist and children’s book writer and illustrator, has taught more than 300,000 children basic drawing techniques, he said. But he was born with a hereditary genetic defect known as polycystic kidney disease. The disease causes numerous fluid-filled cysts to grow in the kidneys, which over the course of many years cause the kidneys to fail.

Sutton, a longtime exhibitor, was on dialysis for three years; he eventually couldn’t work, so he moved to Texas.

“I looked like a dead possum,” he said, describing gray skin and being extremely bloated.

Sutton had been talked out of seeking a kidney transplant, but a friend of Kinney’s who had the operation described to him how it changed her life.

She also changed Sutton’s mind.

“I told her later, ‘You didn’t come here to see art; you came here to save a life,’” Kinney said.

The next bit of serendipity took place when a collector who had bought some of Sutton’s works offered initially to donate some blood, and then later offered a kidney.

“What do you say to something like that?” Sutton asked.

After 22 tests, the donor turned out to be a perfect blood match and a two-thirds kidney match. Sutton received his transplant on July 1, 2005; before the surgery was finished, his new kidney was working — a rare occurrence.

It’s now been more than a year since Sutton’s operation. Within three weeks of the operation, Sutton was able to eliminate 25 pounds of toxins from his system.

Today, his skin is no longer ashen and he has returned to his normal size. “I’m able to live a fairly normal life,” he said.

He recalls an artist friend in Los Angeles who told him, “Your art saved your life.”

Kinney is a former businesswoman turned artist. When she’s not exhibiting her oils at the festival, she juries competitions, offers art classes and gives tours through a network of arrangements at many local hotels and programs. Several hotels use her imagery as part of their corporate branding efforts.

Watercolor artist Lorraine E’drie, an exhibitor for 28 years who has a lifetime teaching credential in art from UCI, has a booth right beside her daughter, 27-year exhibitor Paula Hinz.

Hinz, who paints in acrylic and oil, lives on a horse ranch in Northern California, but flies down every weekend during the festival season to stay with her mother in Newport Beach, E’drie said.

“The festival gives us two months together,” she said; they otherwise only see each other at major holidays.

Swiss-born artist Johann Ulrich moved to California one and a half years ago at the behest of his friend and manager.

“I moved because I love California and I’m not so far away from Hawaii here,” he joked. Ulrich, the winner of the Art-A-Fair’s 2006 Spirit Award, maintains a studio in Lake Forest.

“The most important thing I do is teach,” Ulrich said. “What I want to do is help children start to think with both sides of their brain.”

He teaches comic drawing to children, and as an Art-a-Fair workshop teacher, maintains that he can teach anyone how to draw in just half an hour.

Ulrich will offer a comic drawing workshop on Saturday. The children’s workshop is from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; the adult section is from 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

“Picture language is the only universal language we have,” Ulrich said. “Everybody understands a pictogram.”

Lan Huang, originally from Mongolia, agrees. She has resided in Irvine for the past four years, and displays her Chinese brush painting and calligraphy at the festival. She also conducts workshops with the aid of her interpreter and apprentice, KC Horng.

In addition to exhibiting and teaching at the Art-A-Fair, Huang teaches at the Lakeside Senior Center in Irvine, where she regularly has 20 to 30 pupils.

“I like it here very much,” Huang said through her interpreter. She said that the festival gives her a chance to express her art and her Chinese culture.

Huang studied under the masters of Chinese calligraphy, and her works have been exhibited in many Chinese shows, newspapers and on monuments.

Horng said that she will follow Huang for life. “In Chinese culture, you find one master you like so much,” Horng said. “She is like a mother; she gives more than 100%.”

The Art-A-Fair, 777 Laguna Canyon Road, runs through Monday, Sept. 4. Festival admission will be free on Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call (949) 494-4514 or visit www.art-a-fair.com.