Free Art Friday

Yesterday, Friday Jan 12th, All The Goods took part in Free Art Friday. The basic premise of Free Art Friday is that artists will leave their work around downtown St. Petersburg. They leave it in the bushes, in trees, on benches and tables as well as any other stealthy place they can think of. They also make sure to leave their contact info with the art. The people who came up with this idea wanted artists to be able to get the word out on their art without having to deal with galleries and things of that nature. When one would find a piece of art the general idea was to have the lucky finder contact the artist as a way of letting the artist know that their work has made it into hands that probably might not have in other means. We think that Free Art Friday is a fine idea. Anything that supports and promotes other people's art and passions always gets a thumb's up from us.

 

We at All The Goods also have a full time "normal job" so we would not have been able to partake of the festivities as we might have liked to. We decided to set out for the 600 block of Central Ave and leave our treasures out for people to find just before sunrise. We wanted to do it as quietly without detection as we could. We had a blast setting our art into planters, in doorways, leaning against windows and other places. The art that we ended up choosing went into baggies with three cards in them per bag.

 

 

The above photo will give you a rough idea of the sort of thing we gave away. We just put our info on the backs of all the cards. After placing these carefully, we then sped off to work.

 

By a stroke of luck, we were able to get out of our job a half hour early and headed right back downtown to see what we could find and to see if all of our bags had been picked up. Since we got down there about 4:00 pm, we felt that we'd missed the boat. We didn't see any art anywhere, except what hung in the galleries we passed. But when we checked the places that we'd placed our own things, everything had been taken. We haven't heard yet from any of the people that took them but we hope that our cards get some good use.

 

We walked as much and as far as we could and only on a return trip back up Central Ave to our car, we found this...

 

 

This sweet little painting sat in a plastic bag on a bench outside a building. We had passed the spot before but had sworn that this hadn't been there the first time. It was as if it was waiting for us. So we took it home with us and emailed the artist that had left it.

 

The artist's name is Coralette Damme and we visited her website as well as her Facebook page. Coralette also goes by the name of The Crafty Hag and we must say that she is amazingly crafty with the things she does. She paints, she draws, she also makes her own block prints and creates her own blocks to use in this process. (If you're curious about her, please take a moment to check her out at www.craftyhag.com and she is listed on FB as The Crafty Hag.)

 

So, yes, we would do Free Art Friday again but maybe this time we'd take the day off from our normal job to spend more time in downtown St. Pete.