By Michael Jewell
The clouds stick together in the sky, a heavy gray menace on a Saturday. The leaves stir restlessly in a gentle wind that lifts the smell of wet dirt to my nostrils. This is the perfect weather; when the sun is still shining and it looks like rain. The problem is that I’m supposed to cover an afternoon of sidewalk chalk drawings.
I wait until the Sidewalk Arts Festival has been under way for a couple of hours before I begin my review, a mistake I will regret later. Forsyth Park at 3 p.m. is very soggy. A few intrepid students remain, holding up towels in vain attempts to stem the drippage from the branches above, or instead carrying on working. One girl furiously grinds a brilliant day-glo mess into the pavement. Her piece is a mimicry of reef fishes, evidently as seen through fogged diver’s goggles. Most students are soaked and smeared with multi-colored chalk stains on their arms, faces and underneath their fingernails. It is parents weekend, and older visitors cling to their kids in sullen clumps, any potential cheer eroded from their long faces. As the rain subsides, a few of the park’s Saturday regulars parade their dogs through the throng of wet, miserable attendees.
It is a good showing for the school. After a year of planning, Mother Nature managed to squeeze in the least desirable weather event possible; one last April shower to interfere with our best laid plans. Although most of the pieces on display lie as abandoned muddy red-brown puddles and half-finished smudges, a good number remain in good condition, some positively unscathed. Here, as always, SCAD students show their perseverance as well as their many talents; a pantheon of beautiful artwork in the most clumsy of children’s media. There is a diversity of ocean life on display as well as chalk and water interpretations of famous masterpieces; the death of Marat and a lonesome-looking girl with a pearl earring. Johnny Cash makes his usual appearance in the same manner as every year, appearing eerily out of some black abyss. There is an unsettling satyr, the best in show, and a humble but extremely cute picture of a girl playing with a seal. Monsters, animals, portraits and a most bizarre image of two fat people telling each other “I heart you” in a bathtub all grace the walkway, allowed as art rather than a playtime or a public nuisance for one drissly afternoon.
This sort of thing happens about every other year, where the arts festival involving either sand castles or sidewalk chalk is washed out by the fickle hand of nature. The rain is a force both life-giving and completely irritating. It’s a necessary last step in the sidewalk art process, a great childhood lesson in the impermanence of all things. Despite being temporarily soaked, a few elite SCAD students spent their Saturday making fabulous art that was there, and gone in an instant.
