Art festival dynamos celebrate homegrown culture
By Chris Mac Kenzie
For The Alpine Sun
ALPINE — It took five young women only 10 weeks to plan, organize and stage the First Annual Alpine Arts Festival last Saturday in the Alpine Nature and Art Center. Officially sponsored by the Southern California Center for Youth, Nature and the Arts, Inc. (CYNA), this non-profit group produced a community celebration of fine arts and artists in Alpine that was well attended and enjoyed.
In those short weeks, these energetic women chose the place, a parklike area at 2612 Alpine Blvd. with huge old live oak trees, arranged for tents, display tables, a rotating program of musicians, a food booth, a silent auction, a beautiful display of prizes for the raffle, persuaded 17 local artists to display their work, printed a program, recruited local businesses as sponsors, and promoted the idea of a town mosaic mural. They even provided craft tables for the children to enjoy, a face painting, balloon blowing clown, Bajo, while Debbie Sakarias created a school art project that decorated one long wall of the park with student drawn art from 10 different local schools.
The five wonder workers were: Bonnie Gendron, Terri King, and Stephanie Wells, coordinators of the whole event, Vanessa Rusczyk, in charge of the mural and the program designer, and Debbie Sakarias, coordinator of the community art show with its 170 entries. All of them recruited their families, husbands, sisters, mothers-in-law, grandparents, and even their kids, to help as volunteers.
The inspiration for the festival began with Gendron, Rusczyk and Sakarias who are part of the team of artists who maintain the CYNA studio and gallery just above the little park, along with Linda Larson and Tim Terry. Its long range goal is to create an Alpine Botanical Garden and Art Center to promote inspiration, creativity and greater appreciation for nature and art in San Diego’s East County.
Thus, the festival itself was free, with any funds earned by the raffle, the auction and the sale of commemorative T-shirts and other items, going to help pay expenses.
The mural project is especially interesting. Rusczyk sketched a drawing of Viejas Mountain, Alpine Creek, flowers, chaparral, a coyote or two, and a red tail hawk soaring over everything on the white board. The four-by-eight-foot mural, will be covered with small pieces of colored tile, stained glass, shells, stones, broken pottery and bottles, even some treasured rocks with little fossils imbedded on them from a loyal friend of the festival.
Folks were invited to bring their own special bits and personally fasten them down with white mastic. The project will be made available for additions until finished. Rusczyk hopes that a mosaic can be created every year for the next 10 years, and mounted on buildings in downtown Alpine as a town art display.
Music was also an integral and pleasant part of the festival. Jim Earp with his guitar and voice, started the morning, followed by Bonnie Gendron on the flute. Then Sylvia Lorraine Hartman playing her harp and piano, with Teri Carpentier and friends on the piano to finish the afternoon.
Photos: The First Annual Alpine Art Festival last Saturday was carefully crafted to appeal to all ages while encouraging the community at large to enjoy all kinds of music and art. Vanessa Rusczyk (top) set the tone with her plan to create a mural with small mosaic pieces contributed by townspeople. Here she begins to glue down the small blue colored tiles with which she is outlining the Alpine Creek in the 4’ x 8’ mural. Two-year-old Kyra Recaharen loves to dance to wonderful deep tones of an eight-foot long didjeridoo played by her dad, Warner Recaharaen (lower left). They are Descanso neighbors of Jack Reeder who creates these ancient Australian instruments using wood from local trees, such as oak and manzanita. Debbie Sakarias (below), who coordinated the exhibit of drawings by children from ten Alpine schools, managed one of the activity tables for youngsters. She’ll operate the button machine after Vanissa Orozco from Boulder Oaks School finishes a colorful design on her button.
Photos by Chris Mac Kenzie/The Alpine Sun
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