Arrogant Artist

The Irondequoit Art Trail, mostly artist’s home studios, is a spaced out affair. Irondequoit itself is pretty spaced out, stretching from Empire Boulevard at the bottom of the bay to neighborhoods that back up to the river off Saint Paul which runs all the way up to the lake and then across the lakeshore to Sea Breeze. We started out following a pdf that we downloaded and picked up a map at I-Square Gallery but one of the artists had another map with small graphic samples of each of the artists on the trail so we switched to that. They were all slightly different and it is hard to connect the dots.

Three stops stood out. Craig Wilson’s studio on Saint Paul was one. He had just set up a tent that he planned on using at the Clothesline Show. Instead of just admiring his metal sculpted fish we entertained various methods of hanging the hefty works and we considered the advantages of the grey or white mesh backgrounds. And Craig recommended a car mechanic for us before we left. Ours has just retired.

This guy named Beaty had all his paintings out in his driveway. He told us he wasn’t a very good art student so just copied paintings out of books and we could see the evidence as we sifted through stacks of Cezanne’s, Picasso’s and Van Gogh’s.

Two houses on Lake Bluff Road (it looks exactly like it sounds) showed watercolors that paled in comparison to the view out their windows but a nearby stop at a Quonset Hut on Culver had no windows at all to compete with the work of John Leonard. He told us he is a roofer and he just bought the place because his house was full and he planned to name it, “The Artist’s Cave” and added, “the tagline will be, “Not So Fine Art.” He was painting the ceiling to look like a cave and his work was everywhere, all sorts of styles in all mediums. Some of it was very good like his self portrait called, “The Arrogant Artist.”

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