We took Richard and Katy to the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton today. Although I do enjoy looking at some of the art, I've never liked going places among a crush of people. And having to wait while people look at the stuff I'm not interested in while surrounded by hordes of people is nearly intolerable. So, since I wasn't planning to enjoy myself anyway, I volunteered to take charge of the children and follow them around. They immediately rushed over and began touching things. I asked them to please look at the prices ($3400, for example) and suggested they should only touch things they were actually planning to purchase with money they had in their pockets.
"But we didn't bring any money," Charlie said.
"Exactly," I replied. "So point at things, but please don't touch them."
Once we got that ground rule in place, life was a lot better.
Walking through the first tent, I saw this hideous, orange wall-hanging. It was a bunch of antigoggling squares cut out of some material and assembled in a haphazard, lopsided sort of way. It was stunning in the scale of its loud and perverse nature. I didn't look at the price, but I thought "Huh. I could do as well with some foam posterboard and a can of spray paint."
Half way through the first tent, the boys saw the 
Herrel's Ice Cream Bus. (You can skip the eye-poppingly bad flash animation.) It is a converted English double-decker bus where you can buy the ice-cream and then climb to the upper deck to eat it under an umbrella. I convinced them to wait at least until we'd finished the first tent. Coming out of the tent at the other end, they saw the fiber arts center tent with hands-on activities for children. Charlie was excited to see a loom -- on his class field trip to Old Deerfield, they had been shown how a loom worked and he demonstrated to Daniel, alternately holding down two pedals while sliding the shuttle back and forth. After a few passes, Daniel took a turn and experimented with holding different arrangements of pedals down. I pointed out to him that he didn't have to cross his legs to hold down different arrangements of pedals -- His legs were barely long enough as it was.
I think he would have kept doing it all day, given the chance. He has a tremendous focus when he brings it to bear. Afterwards, they made felted rock paperweights and then went to have some ice cream.
On the way home, that ugly orange sculpture kept preying on my mind. I finally couldn't stand it anymore. I made a mental checklist and had us stop at the store on the way home. I got two sheets of foam poster board ($3), some styrofoam ($6 -- intended for floral arrangements), and a can of red spray paint ($1). I got out my hot-glue gun and utility knife, cut up the poster board, haphazardly glued it together (with the styrofoam behind some parts to give it more three-dimensionality), and then spray-painted the whole thing red.
In retrospect, I should have painted the individual pieces and then assembled them. Then, I could have used a mix of colors and textures. Now I think I'm going to have to make a whole series, with faux-granite, gold, silver, etc. Maybe make and use some stencils to do overpainting on some of the prominent features or over some of the interesting textures. At $10 a pop for materials, its a medium I can explore in some depth.
What? What does the red square represent? Why "Man's Inhumanity to Man", of course.
StevenBrewer