A few of us went up to Lake Worth Sunday for the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival. It was the 22nd year for this great event. The center of this little town is taken over by artists and the streets become works of art. It starts on Saturday morning and ends Sunday night. There is all this art and lots of food and music.
On Monday, the streets are open and come-what-may, cars, people, pets, they all walk on the art and by the end of the week it’s gone. Ephemeral.
This past weekend we had a couple of arts festivals in town. They were a lot of fun, I went all three days with different friends and family. There are a lot of art shows this time of year in Miami. We have a couple more coming up, I may go to the Street Painting Festival in Lake Worth next weekend, and then in March there is one final show, which is more of a block party. One of our favorite ones of the year.
This is from 2008, a friend painted me at a local restaurant. I hadn’t seen this painting since back then, she gave it to me the other day. Love it.
The rest of these photos are just some of this weekend’s art shows.
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I have a bad habit – I don’t wash my car. Not sure why, but it’s filthy for months on end. The car wash I used to go to closed, and the guy that used to come to my home stopped coming. But still, my dirty car has always been a thing.
Recently I came downstairs and the car was washed! It was sparkling! My car isn’t new, but when it’s washed it looks like the day I bought it. I’m thinking the maintenance man for our condo building did it because before Christmas he walked me over to my car one day and asked me why it was so filthy. He wrote his name on the dirty trunk hood.
It reminds me of about 17 years ago when I first moved into the building. One of my neighbors, I can’t think of his name now, he moved out about 16 years ago, used to wash my car for me. Only I didn’t know it!
He parked right next to me. The day I moved in he was washing his car, he seemed to love to wash his car, I guess it was a form of relaxation for him.
One day, maybe a year later, he asked me, “How do you like your car? Did you notice how clean it is?” And I said, “Yes, looks good.” And he says, “Well, I washed it!”
“You did?” I asked, and I remember his exact words, “Yes. It was so filthy I couldn’t take it anymore!”
I was a bit dumbfounded and thanked him. He then told me that he had been washing it for the past year every time he washed his car which was once a week at least. He asked, “Didn’t you notice?” I said, “Yes, but I thought the rain did it!” You know, when it rained and I drove in the rain, I thought that cleaned the car!
I don’t think he cared for that response and I don’t think he washed my car again after that. So last week when I saw the car washed it reminded me of that time. I haven’t seen our maintenance man, but I want to thank him and tip him if it was him and perhaps have him do it on a regular basis.
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I spent last Sunday on Lincoln Road on South Beach where they have a great Fernando Botero exhibit up an down the road. It was interspersed among the monthly antique market.
There are a lot of Boteros where I live, a couple of restaurants in my neighborhood have big Botero works outside and there is a big park called Fairchild Tropical Gardens where there are Boteros as time all throughout the acreage there. I’ve also seen Chihuly’s there, as well, spread around the park.
Art season has started in Miami. For the next few months there are lots of festivals and art shows. I attended two this weekend. Two old ones, they have both been around for years.
Today I was in South Beach for the Art Deco Festival and yesterday we went to the Beaux Arts Festival in Coral Gables. That festival is close to home, it’s on the University of Miami campus. I’ve been going to both festivals since I’m a kid. Yes, they’ve been around that long. It’s also Regatta season for the next six months, but I don’t really deal with that. I live on the water, but I’m not much of a boater.
I know a lot of the artists from over the years and from the neighborhood. They tend to go from festival to festival and so do I, so I guess I’ll see a lot of them this coming winter.
My favorite thing is to eat my way through the festivals. I love festival food and other great food and drinks. One of the festivals in February has an English tea room and for all three days of that festival I have tea and scones with friends. Whoever is around, I drag over with me and everyone enjoys that – English tea with scones with jelly and clotted cream! I go for three days because the festival is right in my neighborhood and it’s easy to just stay put for the weekend rather than deal with the traffic in and out of town. I’ll post pictures of that next month.
I’m working on my comic strip Hal and High Water, and hopefully will start publishing daily, but I have an idea that I’ve been considering. And that’s taking breaks, sort of having seasons, with breaks in between.
I know, I didn’t even start yet and I’m talking about taking a break! But listen, seriously. What I mean is, cartoonists work 365 days a year, they never stop, they never get vacations and if they do they have to build up that time by working extra hard to get a backlog of comics so that they can take time off. But what if the comic ran for a month or two or three and then there was a break, sort of like a tv show. The comic runs, ends with a cliffhanger, takes a month off, and then comes back for a new “season.”
A webcomic can do that very easily not so much a newspaper comic. But why not?
What if a newspaper comic ran for three months, then took time off and in that time another comic ran? What if three or four comics took up one space in the newspaper – sort of like the old days with tv, when a show would take the summer off and there would be a summer replacement. Years ago, that was the norm on tv and these last few years it’s been like that where there are not many reruns, other shows take up the time slot and there are usually three tv seasons now in a year.
So a newspaper comic would run a few months, maybe three months or six months, then take a break and in that three or six months another comic would run, then perhaps another comic or the original comic would come back, but they would run on some sort of schedule.
I’m thinking of doing that with Hal and High Water as a webcomic – running it for a period of time and then taking a short period of time off. Hopefully the readers will be there upon its return, but a good cliffhanger may be needed for that – sort of like a “Who shot JR?” cliffhanger.
I had written once about switching up my own comics over the year – run a panel cartoon for a few months, then a comic strip, then something else, but that would defeat the purpose of having time off. It would allow me to publish my different ideas and features over time, but it would not give me time off.
So I’m toying with the idea of taking breaks during the year – yes, even before I started publishing.
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One of my favorites. When I drew it last year, the ’20s seemed 100 years ago!
Another Art Basel/Art Miami behind us, well almost, Sunday is the last day of the yearly event. It’s a thing called Miami Art Week where art is all over the city and tourists pour out of the woodwork.
The big thing this year was the $120,000 banana. Surely a publicity gimmick, but supposedly some artists sold a banana that was duct taped to the wall for that amount. It was the talk of the city, at our usual Friday night family night, everyone knew about it. I looked for it at the shows, but it got eaten by the time we arrived!
The one interesting and sad thing is that a couple of the Art Shows – Art Miami and Context are on the former site of The Miami Herald. The Herald moved out to western Miami-Dade County a few years ago and the site is now empty. So they put down pavement platforms and huge tents, larger than football fields, and the art shows go on once a year.
The view out back is spectacular because as was the case years ago, newspapers and factories and such were on the water for easy access by water and they occupied prime land. Now that land is open and spectacular and the Herald is on the other side of the airport somewhere. Long Island City, Queens and Brooklyn New York are like this, the old waterfront which was occupied by factories and such are now open to parks, restaurants and expensive condos. Society is reclaiming the waterfront, which was a dark, spooky place for so many years.
Went to one of my favorite places the other day – MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. They recently completed a $450 million renovation. I keep telling people it was $40 million, but it was $450 million. I of course, couldn’t see the whole thing, but I did make sure I saw Starry Night, my favorite. I searched and searched and it took me awhile, but I found it. Right there, all blue and beautiful like always.
The guards are quite scary, they look you up and down as if you are going to do something, they just pop out of nowhere and inspect you with their beady eyes. To be fair. there are many tourists during holiday weeks and probably more people are attending the museum than at quieter times of the year.
It rained on Sunday, so I went to the MET Museum in New York, I mean I would have gone anyway, but usually I go the day after Thanksgiving as a tradition. And this time I did something different. I didn’t take pictures, or many pictures. I did post a few on Facebook, but then after a bit I put my phone/camera down and enjoyed the experience, which is something we don’t do these days.
No matter where we are, we are looking through the camera and not enjoying the actual experience. At the museum, at concerts, at a party at a ball game at a parade – everywhere, we are not enjoying the experience, we are missing it by trying to get the best photos.
There was a time at museums and concerts, where you were not permitted to take photos. Now they are permitted to do that, I guess they can’t control it anymore; and at concerts, videos are allowed, but for some reason they don’t like that at museums. They’ll allow snap shots but not videos. I got yelled at this past summer for taking videos at the MET.
Anyway, I put my camera away and enjoyed the experience and it was quite enjoyable. I was tempted to take the camera out when I saw others buried in their phones among the most magnificent art in the world – the Masters and ancient Egyptian and Chinese antiquities. I’m not sure what was so important on their phones, but Egypt and Matisse and Van Gogh and the rest were not as interesting, I guess.
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