I thought perhaps competition from the Fringe Festival might be cause for the empty streets at 4 p.m. When I passed by the fence on 2nd Street, where individual artists hawk their wares, I found nada.
But by 5:30, the fence had morphed into an art enterprise zone.
And although some of the fence hangers I’d seen before, there were a fresh crop with refreshing new work to discover.
Among the highlights are the work of Matthew Green, a graduate of Rowan, whose portraits of the seamy side of the unpopulated, abandoned carcasses of city buildings are poetic and surreal.
Prices ranged from $750 to $1,700, and didn’t seem too far out of line although perhaps a bit more than the traffic would bear from a street vendor without the imprimatur of a gallery.
Also on the fence were small reversed glass paintings by Delia King (sorry about the glare on the image) with lushly colored frames, at $50 a pop. My favorite was a dual portrait of Saddam Hussein and George Bush. King studied mathematics and philosophy in school, but then apprenticed herself to a reverse glass painter, and here she was.
I love the get-up-and-go of young artists plugging their wares under the sun and stars. But then I also loved the saga of John, shown here with Roberta in 3-D glasses, selling prints he made of his brother ReK‘s colored-pencil art. The 3-D discovery was by happenstance, but John figured it was a good thing, so he was selling each print for $20 with its own 3-D glasses. The 3-D effects are pretty wild. Get one for your apartment wall and you’ve got a great conversation piece.
