Spring has sprung: Arts participation blooms at Sawdust Art Festival
Approximately 5,000 tickets were sold — including some annual passes — during the three-day show, said Nancy Villere, vice president of the festival's board of directors.
The spring-themed event ran from Friday through Sunday, livening up the grounds with an array of brightly-colored floral displays and interactive stations for visitors to reengage with their creative side.
Community contributions from participants, ranging in age from young children to seniors, finished off the colorful murals. The future of the completed community art projects is yet to be determined as festival organizers consider what to do next.
'Every day, we put a new board up, and we removed the existing one,' Villere said. 'We saved it. Our art education director AnnJo Droog would redraw her beautiful floral banner of designs that people could then come the next day and paint in.'
People responded to the community art project.
'We kind of realized we could repurpose these and use them around the grounds. For one, it would be a reminder of all the fun that we all had at Spring Fling. There's just some magic that happened that weekend that those pieces captured for us.'
At the play house, attendees took turns playing trend-setting fashion designers as they applied decorations to a skirt on a mannequin.
There were about five or six art experiences for festival-goers in addition to the opportunity to mingle with and shop for the work of an estimated 150 artists. Among the experiences, visitors also participated in a paper flower-making station.
Villere said it was fun to bring the childlike sense of 'no judgment' to the artistic exploration of guests coming to the festival.
'I'm so glad everybody gets what I get when I paint,' Villere said. 'If they get a little bit of that happiness, I'm thrilled.'
Apart from the artists with a booth, there were also those who did their best work on stage. The musical performances over the weekend included the Salty Suites, an acoustic band often booked locally. Artist Adam DeVito captured the performance in a drawing.
The Sawdust Art Festival, which kicked off its 59th season with Spring Fling, will also have its annual summer show and the holiday-themed Winter Fantasy later in the year.
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Los Angeles Times
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- Los Angeles Times
Sawdust Festival to host auction to support artists benevolence fund
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Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Sawdust Festival brings ‘magic' during kickoff event for its 59th season
It was an unmistakable scene as a line of foot traffic weaved its way toward downtown and threatened to overtake the Village Entrance. Laguna Beach's local-focused Sawdust Art Festival reopened its doors for an invite-only preview night on Tuesday, and what played out was nothing short of a family reunion. Just ask Doug Miller, the lively acrylic painter who was sorely missed when a battle against sepsis landed him in a hospital during much of the show last summer. The 78-year-old was treated like a hometown hero, guests lining up to say hello, and in kind, he greeted many by taking their picture. 'I rebounded,' Miller said. 'I came from the dead back, I think. My skin turned gray, somebody said. It was pretty scary. The doctor said it's like an oil spill in your bloodstream, and it has to clear out. It takes about two months to clear that out.' The Sawdust has been a second home to Miller for much of his life. 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'And we're so mechanical now in society that I want to get away from that. I want to get back to nature. 'I took ceramics in high school, and I did the wheel, and I could do it, but I decided I didn't want to do the wheel,' she said. 'It was too mechanical. … It just wasn't my gig, so I got into hand-building, and I fell in love.' Then there was mixed media artist Linnea Brooks, whose artwork included a multi-level, ladder-climbing scene she whimsically referred to as 'Thousand Steps,' after the beach in South Laguna. She also produced sculptures of the Victoria Beach Pirate Tower. 'I had a pile of wood sitting in my yard,' said Brooks, who said she started building her pieces in October. 'I was looking at it one day going, 'What am I going to do with that?'' It's a homecoming of sorts for Brooks, an architect who grew up in Laguna Beach before moving to Hawaii for 31 years. She's been back for three years. 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Sawdust Festival artists take on teaching in seminar at Sage Hill
Ron Shearer's artistic journey began at home, but it wasn't until decades later that he reconnected with those roots through a chance encounter while abroad. Shearer recalls cutting tile for his mother's mosaic hobby in his youth. While abroad in Italy in 2009, he walked into a shop of a mosaic artist, and it brought those memories back to the surface. 'I didn't foster it then, or I didn't fall in love with it [as a child],' Shearer said. 'I was 8 years old, and I wanted to go out and ride my bike. About 52 years later is when I went to Italy, and I walked into this fellow's shop, and I said, 'Wow.' This reminded me of what I did with my mom.' The Santa Ana native came back from that visit and taught himself how to do mosaic art, using what he observed in that shop and a few of the mosaics he still had from his mother's work in the 1950s. Shearer, who said he has exhibited at the Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach for 25 years, started in metal sculpture. He has since rededicated his efforts to mosaic and often teaches classes or works out of his booth while on the grounds. This week presented an opportunity to offer some inspiration to others, as Shearer was one of a handful of Sawdust artists to give students a hands-on experience at Sage Hill School. 'The biggest hurdle that I have to overcome from teaching someone, whether it be kids or whether it be adults, is that it is a deferred gratification,' Shearer said of mosaic art. 'It takes time to do a mosaic, and it's something you can't hurry. A lot of people want to sit down and finish it in an hour and a half, and it's really hard to do. It takes time to do it.' Needing to make the task manageable within school hours, the students worked on mosaic coasters that were approximately 4 square inches on Friday. Shearer came prepared with 10 different colors of cut tile, glue and coasters to serve as makeshift canvases. Students had a chance to cut and arrange tile pieces, then come up with a design before attempting to glue and assemble a finished product. Some packed geometric shapes into stars, while others placed living things such as fish into the body of their design. The workshop was part of the inaugural Sawdust Art Festival Survey, one of nearly two dozen seminars offered to students at the school through the Spring at Sage program. 'Sage Hill and Sawdust Art Festival are natural partners as institutions of creativity and excellence in Orange County,' said Daniel Langhorne, a school spokesman. 'We're very grateful for these professional artists inspiring our students to explore new media and express themselves.' AnnJo Droog, director of art education at the Sawdust Festival, said other participants in the week-long collaboration included Hedy Buzan, Gabe Sullivan and Julie Setterholm. The program also exposed students to copper enameling, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and sketching. There wasn't much work to do in terms of securing artists for the workshops, said Droog, who added, 'Everybody wanted to come.' 'What my job really was to do was to be mindful of what we were going to give the students,' Droog said. 'So try to give them really diverse art experience, so that's why we've jumped from printmaking to painting to mosaics, so they get a taste of a lot. They've had a lot to learn this week, but they're an amazing group, and they're really into it, as well. They're really intent and focused on their work. It's fabulous.' Preserving the artists colony is often a topic of discussion in Laguna Beach, which is home to three art festivals, including the Festival of Arts and Laguna Art-A-Fair. Droog dreamed about the possibility of building the colony with more artists. 'Sharing [art] with the younger generation and getting them enthusiastic,' Droog said. 'If we have created inspiration in somebody in that room who wants to make art a career, 'Wow,' what an achievement.'
