Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. Feel free to keep reading if you want to.
It's been about two months since the Middleton Library show began featuring several of my plein air watercolor paintings and the "Playing With My Food" series featuring a Peg Leg Pickle Pirate story where the images were still-life watercolor paintings and the story was written (literally both story and physical text writing) by Chessie Sutherland. In this third part, together we had a meet-the-artists event at the library where we had a bunch of junk drawer items as well as nearly rotten fruit and vegetables from the local market selling these items at deep discounts.
Some of the Middleton Library staff playing with the food and junk drawer items, creating scenes.
Chessie provided captioning and word bubbles with her calligraphy skills upon request from the young particpants.
In the end, we engaged with about 40 people, many of them were kiddos and their grown-ups or some combination. Just a fun side note, about five older adults that came through made negative comments towards the activity. I personally had thought that this kind of response was somewhat shocking. Comments ranged from disgust regarding the food being near spoiled, others indicated that touching food of any kind was "disgusting."
Here I was thinking we had picked some of the most non-controversial subject matter and originally I felt kind of lame as an artist. Really, the fact that people were having such a range of emotions toward this activity was a validating experience that I was completely unprepared for. Huzzah! We are artists after all! Big thanks to those who came to the event and supported our collaborative efforts with the #Middletonpubliclibrary in #Wisconsin.