April in Review (Weeks 14, 15 & 16): Southern Garden Festival, Artwalk, Opelousas Photography Session, New Photos on DeviantArt

Week Fourteen: March 30th to April 5th, 2014
Week Fifteen: April 6th to April 12th, 2014
Week Sixteen: April 13th to April 19th, 2014

It's allergy season, everybody! Which means that I am doing my best not to get really sick by using a neti pot, gurgling all the salt water I can and downing all the antihistamines and nasal decongestants that I can safely take. Meanwhile, the telltale symptoms of a cold--a runny nose, a sore throat and the occasional sneeze and cough--won't leave me be. In other news, for the first time in weeks, I've spent a bit more time on the blog and posted a few things that weren't "week in review" posts. I show the step-by-step process behind a digital painting of Dean Winchester and the step-by-step views of a beaded object originally intended to be a pendant. And, last week, I used far too many words on an essay/rant about Miranda Lambert's song, "Automatic."

In the world outside of the internet, I attended two arts and crafts events as a vendor. The Southern Garden Festival, held in the botanical gardens of the Schoeffler home, was a weekend long event in early April. There was an charity silent auction on Friday night, where items donated by art vendors were auctioned off. On Saturday, art vendors were stationed throughout the grounds among oak trees, flower beds and patios. Musicians played throughout the day in a gazebo, and a male quartet walked around the vendor area, pausing and singing every once and a while. A dragon boat passed by periodically on the Vermillion River. All activities on Sunday were cancelled due to rain. I didn't attend the auction on Friday, but I was there all day on Saturday. I arrived with only one thing on my mind--getting the booth that Dawn Darbonne and I shared set up. I didn't really relax until a couple hours later, when I was finally sitting in the completed booth. I attended the Southern Garden Festival last year, and though I didn't count the number of vendors that were present last year, there seemed to be 50% more this year. One female sculptor had her pottery wheel set up and lovely ceramic bowls, plates and other items arranged on the patio around her. Another woman made greeting cards decorated with tissue-paper flowers. There was one other photographer besides myself, a handful of painters/printmakers, a quilt maker, a doll clothes seller, a couple of food vendors, a soap and body spray maker, one woman selling only steampunk-themed jewelry, and a seller with leaf-shaped ceramic planters. I saw a few people I remembered from last year, including a wood carver with totem poles and carved fish and other cool things.

Southern Garden Festival, April 2013

Southern Garden Festival, April 2014

On April 12th, Dawn and I returned to the steps of the First United Methodist Church in Lafayette for 2nd Saturday Artwalk. It wasn't a busy day, unlike the last time we'd been there in February. We had four customers total, and we were the only vendors, which makes me wonder how well the Artwalk in March went. The weather was good, though, and the church is a nice building, so it wasn't all bad. We plan to return in May in the hopes that we'd do better next time, and we've tossed around ideas about how to attract more of the regular Artwalk crowd.

Next week, I hope to attend the Steampunk and Makers Ball on April 30th in Lafayette, Louisiana, though my participation is unconfirmed right now.

On Saturday, April 19th, I spent two and a half hours walking around downtown Opelousas, Louisiana, snapping photos. I took three hundred or so of St. Landry's Catholic Church. In the business section of downtown, I found abandoned storefronts, open businesses in buildings surrounded by abandoned shops, and more prosperous businesses around the courthouse. I found crumbling concrete and mosaic foundations of buildings that just weren't there anymore, located directly across the street from intact and open businesses. My guess is the foundations belonged to buildings there were either bulldozed at some point or destroyed in hurricanes. The overall degraded state of downtown doesn't bode well for the Opelousas economy, though businesses outside of the downtown area seemed to be doing well. At least from a photographer's standpoint, the downtown area made for intriguing subject matter. On a happier note, art has its place in Opelousas in the form of statuary and murals. Just as Lafayette, Louisiana has pelican statues painted in a variety of ways on display in various outdoor spots in the city, and Austin, Texas has a similar project in the form of painted longhorn statues, Opelousas's theme is violins painted with murals. I found a few in random spots on downtown sidewalks (including one violin offering a peak at a plantation house, stationed on a street corner with more modern and mundane brick and plaster buildings) and several on the grounds of the courthouse.

I haven't posted many new photos on DeviantArt during these past few weeks. Another view of Engelberg, CH shows another street in that town, while Petals - 14 and Petals - 13 feature up-close views of Amaryllis, now blooming here in Louisiana. I would have posted more photos on DeviantArt lately, but I've been occupied, instead, with updating the photography galleries on my web site. I've also been busy with filling out sales tax forms for sales tax collected at arts and crafts fairs. The Louisiana Department of Revenue and local parish school boards have a whole host of rules about which sales tax should be applied (depending on the location of the event) and what types of artwork are exempt (if the event took place within a Cultural District). I've attended events in Iberia Parish and Lafayette Parish, and both parishes apply different sales tax rates to different areas of Lafayette and New Iberia.