Local artists set up shop inside Sacred Heart Church on Saturday afternoon to sell handcrafted paintings, pottery, jewelry and more at Bloomington’s Affordable Art Fair, all selling items for $25 or less.
Customers trickled in and were greeted at the door by Dan Caldwell, the pastor at Sacred Heart, who offered free coffee and tea, as well as “Pay What’d you Like” cookies to attendees.
“The [desserts] fits with our values of economic justice; we don’t want a person’s financial situation to exclude them,” Caldwell said, explaining the goal of selling ‘Pay What’d you Like’ treats.
Caldwell said this was the first time the church opened its doors for the art fair event, although the fair has taken place at other locations in the past.
Past Caldwell’s booth of cookies and drinks was a space filled to the brim with vendors and customers, the room swelling with melodic piano music performed by Otis Cantrell Music.
One of the artists present was surrealist painter Amy Dunn, whose artwork can be purchased on her website. Dunn specializes in digital work for musicians creating album art. She also works with oil paintings, acrylic and watercolor. She sold colorful paintings at the event, including an abstract picture of a praying mantis. She also offered live paintings, which customers could choose the price of.
“The music art is really important because I’m able to get the albums before they’re released and listen to them,” Dunn said. “I get to work with a musician in a different way, because I’m making a visual for their music, so it’s like I have to blend my ear to their interpretation. It’s a process, but I really enjoy it.”
The Bloomington resident has been in business for 11 years and explained her creative method involves listening to music, especially sad music.
“My favorite album is Ruminations by Conor Oberst, and it’s an extremely sad album, but I love to paint to that,” she said. “The sadder the music, the more I can express.”
Newer to the world of art markets, IU doctoral candidate Sasha Weiss has been selling their artwork for a week.
“I’ve done a lot of art auctions for other causes for years, but I’ve only ever been doing art markets since last week,” Weiss said. “A friend got me into it, and that gave me the confidence to keep doing it.”
Weiss creates realistic paintings of locations, including a piece inspired by the pro-Palestinian Dunn Meadow encampment from this spring and summer. This is the piece they are most proud of. The painting depicted the grassy area of Dunn Meadow, with a Palestinian flag in the corner.
“It was a painting of something that came from a community coming together,” they said.
The money from portraits Weiss sells goes toward various funds, including Black Lives Matter.
Weis also created other abstract paintings of nature and people to sell at the market, including an eccentric scene of a rocket hurtling down from a bright pink sky.
Weiss explained painting and drawing is their favorite hobby to do in their downtime.
“It helps me feel like I can do something tangible in the world while it’s burning around me,” Weiss said. “There’s not that much I can do about that, but what I can do is hope that art can communicate the urgency of it.”
Weiss added that in the future, they hope to continue putting art out into the world in order to communicate with others.
“I think that’s the purpose of art,” Weiss said. “That’s what I want my art to do: communicate with people.”
