Saturday, July 11, 2009


It's the thirtieth year of Art Fair On (and Off) The Square in Madison! Wouldn't this saxophone-playing hippo look great in your entryway?

Find the fish.

The guy who makes airplanes out of soda cans wasn't there this year, so the gal who makes fish out of tin is filling in.

If there was a better sculpture for the garden than Sam-I-Am with green eggs and ham, I didn't see it.

A curious thing about Art Fair On The Square is that it's attended by people who would love to buy something like this for the garden, but don't have anywhere near the kind of disposable income it would take to buy a piece like this. Mostly it's just people wandering around, taking photos and munching on two-dollar hot dogs.

"Girl With Her Head Chopped Off" would have made an excellent snack bowl to keep salsa chips in beside the sofa. Too bad the asking price was thirty kajillion dollars.

The sheer size of these artworks made them a show-stopper. If I owned a villa and had a couple hundred thousand dollars of disposable income, I might have taken a couple of these home to hang in the broom closet.

The vendor selling handcrafted bed steads placed this nasty-looking abortion right in the middle of his creation. I don't know if he had an odd sense of humor or it was an effort to keep people from photographing his work. So many of the artisans have a weird aversion to allowing photography of any of their pieces, as if we're going to steal their souls.

This guy did windows, combining lots of cut-glass ornamentation, ordinary cast-glass bowls and other fragments, and this metallic peacock.

Asking price: Forty-two million dollars

Frogs seemed to be everywhere at this year's Art Fair On The Square. There were realistic and fanciful frogs, frogs in sculpture, frogs in paintings, photographs of frogs. Must be something in the water.

The Cow on Atwood Avenue, dressed up in Independence Day Bunting for July.