Sawdust Festival Runs All Summer
The Sawdust Festival isn't just another arts and crafts fair like those proliferating around the country each summer. The yearly event in historic, artistic Laguna Beach has local exhibitors, showing paintings, sculpture, ceramics, glasswork, clothing, hats, bags, jewelry, furniture, knick knacks, collectibles and so much more.
Every single art or craft work here is made by hand in Laguna Beach. In this hi-tech age, the Sawdust Festival is an anachronism, a throwback to an age when community was golden and neighbors were friends who often worked together and helped each other.
Summer Solstice
Each year's Sawdust Festival opening, occuring towards the end of June, is Laguna's summer solstice event or type of celebration held in Scandinavian and other northern European countries. Some of France, and especially Paris, hold nearly all night street music musical festivals during the summer solstice.
At these openings, a few hundred local exhibiting artists, other artists, friends of many decades and several generations gather on a balmy evening, packing the several acre parcel of land with sawdust-covered ground, nestled into a Eucalyptus grove, beneath the canyons.
Affirming Their Identity
Like merry-makers of centuries gone by, they consort, party and dance to a 70's style rock band, eat and drink, and admire the newly made wares on display. This gentle but stalwart group celebrates and affirms the identity of their town, established as an artist's community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by California Impressionist painters as William Wendt, Joseph Kleitsch and Anna Hills.
During a time when façade, money, climbing real estate values and art as commerce threaten to overtake their bucolic, creative community on the ocean, the event is characterized by the lack of artifice of exhibitors and guests.
Sawdust Festival Exhibitors
Larry Gill creates large sculptural and waterfall installations, called "Lightfalls," which employ internal illumination, rendering the water as an optical conduit. He has worked with Buckminster Fuller, building innovative hemispheric domes, and created prisms out of polyester resin for Frank Oppenheimer; one is currently on exhibit at San Francisco's Exploratorium. As an exhibitor since the 70's when the festival was a raucous site for alternative art, he says, "The show is very democratic and representative of old Laguna. You come here and you don't know what's around the corner. It's all serendipity."
Other exhibitors include: Jesse Miller who creates multi-media surf art that is 60's inspired; Drake Sawyer who crafts sea-themed jewelry in sterling or 14K, local glass masters, John Barber, Loren Chapman, Gavin Heath and Bruce Freund.
There is Scott Moore whose intricate scenes of mid-century everyday life have a unique twist, and Sawdust Festival founder Dion Wright whose metal sculptures can be friendly or ferocious.
See also Art-A-Fair page, on the arts and crafts event down the street. The Sawdust and Art-A-Fair, both offshoots of the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, are the same age, but have different artistic and exhibiting concepts.
