On Sunday, Susan and I went to the Main Street Arts Festival in Ft. Worth, it’s an event that we enjoy and always seem to find something that we can’t live without.
This year was a little disappointing because there were not as many artists that appealed to either of us, not their fault that they don’t cater to our tastes exclusively.
We did find 2 pieces that we enjoyed enough to purchase though. The first is a framed piece consisting of hand made and painted paper boxes arranged to look like a kaleidoscope in blues, greens and a little yellow. It’s a vertical piece and it looks great and fits a difficult location.
The second piece is the one that struck me and surprised me a bit and is really the subject of this post.
As we were walking north on Main Street, trying to avoid the masses, I looked over and noticed a very innocuous print of 2 children in school or church clothes walking down a railroad track out in the countryside somewhere.
The Artist is Richard Wilson from Greenville, NC and I’ve included a link to his website in this post.
The 2 children in the picture are African-American which is not uncommon in the world as a whole but, I realized that it is uncommon in our collection.
Neither Susan nor I harbor any active discriminatory feelings, who knows what lurks in the recesses of or psyche though. What I realized was that we see the world around us and Mr. Wilson, who is also African-American was painting and drawing the world in and around Greenville. He told us that the kids depicted are his daughters and the boys are his nephews.
For me, I realized that first, the scene depicted was beautiful in it’s complex simplicity (don’t know any other way to describe it). Second, I think we both realized that we had no art by an African-American artist and none portraying African-American life.
I feel confident that it is not intentional and unfortunately we do not come across many A-A artists…maybe we’re not looking in the right places and maybe we should expand our horizons a bit.
There’s not much that is more universal than 2 children going about their daily routine of walking to church and that simplicity is what drew me immediately to that print.
In his booth, we found several other very striking landscape scenes from around Greenville and we will very likely purchase another of this artists fine work.
I’m going on and on but something in this piece really created an awareness of my own blindness to part of the world that we all live in and I am a bit embarrassed to admit it. You could argue that this is color-blindness and that’s a good thing and maybe it is. Unfortunately, I have a nagging feeling that it’s more like color-unawareness and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Something to ponder on the Camino.
We love the piece and can’t wait to get it hung. I encourage you to visit his site and if you’re like me, to visit a new awareness.
Not really The Camino, more like my Personal Camino.