C Gallery owner Connie Rohde has more than a fair amount of experience producing and overseeing chalk festivals. The longtime arts educator organized the Santa Ynez Valley Union High School’s chalk festival for years, amassing as many as 200 student artists, all creating street art in a day. Rohde is now organizing what she calls a “mini chalk festival” at the C Gallery—the first Mexican Masterpieces Chalk Festival on April 11 on Bell Street in Los Alamos.
The event is mini in several respects, Rohde explained, including the number of artists involved. Rather than sprawling 200 artists across Bell Street, Rohde invited more than a dozen friends, former or current students, colleagues, and even family members to join in recreating masterpieces from Mexican artists. The artists will produce chalk paintings no larger than 18-by-24 inches, except for featured artists Lauren Bassett and Chelsea Ward, who will create larger pieces including a mural.
“It’s so people can stroll the sidewalk,” Rohde said. “It’s more intimate that way, right on the Bell Street sidewalk, with all these trained artists.”
The show will include the re-creation of masterworks by the likes of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Fernando Botero, Carmen Lomas Garza, Mari Jose Marin, Olga Costa, and Rufino Tamayo. All of the artists involved in the festival will be donating their talents. Rohde will provide the chalk and other supplies, but onlookers can tip each artist, and those proceeds will go toward the Los Alamos library project.
“I am providing the chalk for them, and whatever they need to keep their hands clean, but it is just people doing it who are interested in doing it,” she said. “We’re coming together for that sort of idealistic reason of art for art’s sake.”
The free event includes artists Eileen Armijo, Stephanie Croff, Conne and Lee Stanchfield, Linda Small, Debbie Ulrich, Katie Klock, Jesse and Ashley Rohde, George Hernandez, Christie Schaeffer, Joe Castle, Linda Daniels, Nancy Clark, Lori Craviotto, and Brittany Clay—all using chalk and sidewalk to recreate renowned paintings.
The challenges of working with chalk compel some artists to bring their own chalk. These challenges and obstacles are well known to Rohde, and served as inspiration for the work she chose to create with Lee Stanchfield.
“You have to take into consideration the texture of the concrete you are working on, so if it’s really rough concrete, you have to accommodate for that,” she said. “For Mexican masterpieces, you know The Stonemason is perfect. Capture stone by working on concrete? Good match.”
Though each work is destined to succumb to the elements, just producing the piece to look right is a challenging task itself. Chalk is unlike paints, because it doesn’t adhere to the surface it sits on. The artist must be cognizant of several factors all at once, Rohde explained.
“I think the main thing about chalk is that chalk gives you intense color, and it moves freely, so that’s the good news, but the bad new is, it has intense color and it moves freely, it goes everywhere,” she said. “Controlling the chalk so you don’t have intense marks where you don’t want them, or they are blowing around, that gets tricky.”
Rohde designed the free event to attract more Los Alamos residents, those who most likely can’t afford the high-end shops on Bell Street, as well as those who frequent the boutique businesses. The event is cosponsored by Casa Dumetz and Babi’s Beer Emporium and is also receiving support from Café Quackenbush and Bell Street Farm.
Arts Editor Joe Payne hopes it doesn’t rain on April 11. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 9-16, 2015.