Art festival brings 45,000 to Bloomington

In art, there’s a visual phenomenon that occurs when the viewer is too close to the image and therefore can’t see the full picture. It happens often with pointillism paintings. Five inches from the picture, it’s a mass of unimpressive dots.\nSuch is the sensation for many students, who might be too close to Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival to realize its importance. This weekend’s festival attracted more than 45,000 people, including 112 artists and crafts people from across the country and more than 300 applicants vying for a place in this respected festival to put their passion on display, show manager Jean Kautt said.\nBut among students, there’s the impression that a festival in Bloomington probably isn’t nationally renowned.\nAnna Shailer, a graduate student studying French who spent the last semester in Rennes, France, said the town held weekly festivals much like Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival.\n“I guess it just never occurred to me that we have the same thing right here,” Shailer said. \nKautt said she heard from several artists that this was the best year for the 31-year-old street fest.\n“It’s great to hear from the artists that this is the festival they chose,” Kautt said.\nThe fest holds highly publicized clout. Art Fair SourceBook, a trade magazine for fairs in the art and craft industry, has published positive reviews for the Fourth Street Festival for the past three years.\nAndy Chen, an Indianapolis photographer originally from Taiwan, said he decided to come to the festival because of the reviews he had read in trade magazines. Fourth Street, Chen said, attracts the kind of patrons that are interested in his organic style of photography.\n“The big difference about festivals is that you get to meet and interact with the artist,” Chen said. “For people who are just beginning to collect (artwork), this gives them a piece to identify with.”\nThis organic theme is evident in pieces from all of the 15 categories of mediums, Kautt said. One of the top award winners from this year’s fest, Martina Celerin, makes 3-D weavings with pieces of weathered beachwood and stones intertwined.\nCelerin is a prime example of the high-caliber artists on display at Fourth Street, Kautt said. Not only did Celerin receive top awards at Fourth Street, but she recently won first place in the Governor’s Environmental Art Challenge.\nKautt pointed out that the majority of this year’s award winners had never been to Bloomington before.\n“Everybody told us this is a staple of Bloomington,” said Laura Brant, a graduate student who visited the fest for the first time this year. “It’s art as part of education.”