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Somehow the relocation process has proceeded apace despite the recent turbulence in my life (I’m now barely a fortnight away), and this may have been part of the reason I was able to get out of work early enough Sunday to hit the figure sketch session in Detroit put on by the organization I… complained about a few posts ago. This came only a day after the conclusion of the Ann Arbor Art Fair, our big summer tentpole and one of the largest annual art markets in the US. It’s maybe fitting given how my life’s been shaken up recently that I’ve had to revisit some of my earlier opinions on both occasions.

I’ve mentioned before how my feelings on the Art Fair have more or less done a complete circuit in the near-quarter century I’ve lived in this town. The conventional local wisdom is that it’s a necessary plague, on top of everything else forcing people to walk four or five blocks instead of two or three (!!!) to workplaces or hangouts. Admittedly, it was more of a hassle for me back when I lived on the near east side, but as with a lot of other townie complaints, it’s hard not to see how they’ve become self-fulfilling prophecies over the years. The art’s another matter.

Since I started making art myself, I’ve wondered what I could learn from other artists’ practices or work habits (to say nothing of styles or media), and I figured the Art Fair might be a great place to start. Several years into this resolution (the pandemic obviously a big stumbling block there), the jury’s still out. Every year since it came back I’ve done the complete run of booths and always find at least one or two that interest me (out of, admittedly, almost a thousand, but still). This year, I started to recognize returning individual artists (including one local whose work I don’t like anymore now that I have a better sense of my own tastes—reminiscent of all the issues of Chew I bought back in the day).

Some of the latter proved too expensive for me (maybe next year; I assume they’ll be back). I did pick up a couple of prints and postcards and have a couple of awesome new Instagram follows, but a few things rubbed me the wrong way. I’ll simply dwell on one this week. I’ve moaned before on how one driving force for my artwork is that it seems like none of the artists I’ve encountered locally really do what I so often do, ie group scenes, either just a couple or many people in either fantastic or realistic settings. Genre stuff, in other words. I see people sketching other people (seen a lot of that the past year, obviously), people sketching and painting places whether indoors or plein air, but almost never combining the two outside of single or double portraits. This has nagged at me for a while but it really came home to roost during this Art Fair, where we’re gifted (seriously) a wide cross-section of artists at every conceptual level from the US (and occasionally Canada, even now). Nobody did what I was looking for, out of almost a thousand different artists. I looked in all the booths. Seriously.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings about this but will save them for another day. This is an unfolding situation that I’m starting to think has a lot of different applications and implications and I’ve gotten too potentially pretentious already. The header sketch (from Art Fair) probably has similar concerns.

How’s your work going?