The Jury Is In (and It’s Favorable) on 1st Peninsula Arts Festival : 30,000 People Jammed, Enjoyed 2-Day Celebration in Ocean Beach Park

The Halibuts played surf rock. The symphony played Mozart. The Soul Sisters gospel trio moved the crowd to stand up and shout, and Ocean Beach painter Marjorie Nodelman won the $1,000 first prize in the juried art show.

The first Peninsula Arts Festival has come and gone. The 200 craft and food booths, the art tent, the two stages, the fine wine and champagne garden, and all those Port-a-Potties are now history.

By all accounts except one, the festival, designed to raise funds for a permanent Point Loma-Ocean Beach cultural center, was an unabashed success.

“At least 30,000 people attended over the two days,” said festival organizer Ron James. “It was really all families and dogs and bikers. People kept the place clean. People picked up their trash. They were looking for trash cans.”

A spirit of friendship and caring, a little like the ‘60s, James said, pervaded the festival.

However, it appeared on Tuesday that the $50,000-$60,000 weekend event at Collier-Sunset Park off Nimitz Boulevard would incur a shortfall of $5,000-$6,000, a figure the organizers felt they could soon pay off.

“Next year we won’t have problems like that at all,” James said. “We’ll be able to get major sponsors. We could have made enough money so we wouldn’t be in the hole right now. We could have sold beer, but that was not the atmosphere we wanted.

“We had no major crises. Most of the vendors were happy. Some things didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The festival posters didn’t sell as well as we planned. The planes overhead were obnoxious when the symphony was playing. We hadn’t noticed the planes all day until we got the symphony and (oboist) Allan Vogel on stage.

“It really broke in the conductor (music director-designate Yoav Talmi) to San Diego. Of course, everyone clapped in every place they shouldn’t have. And just when Vogel began to play, three bikers on loud motorcycles came into the park and circled a few times, then left.”

James said a planned art auction did not come off.

“We just didn’t have enough people to bring it off,” he said. But (the festival) was not as bad as I thought it would be.”

To the contrary, said painter Dennis Gomes, the Peninsula Festival was a major event, exceptionally well organized and executed.

“Most festivals, when they’re in their first year, don’t even come close to what these people did,” Gomes said. “Most people might just begin with an exhibition of artists and leave it at that. They really put the time in on it.”

Gomes, who lives in Vista, annually exhibits at 15 to 20 festivals and arts fairs around the country. He said elements of the Peninsula Festival compared well with Laguna Beach’s annual summerlong arts and crafts festival. Gomes also praised the festival’s diversity, “the music and food. They had continuous music alternating at each end of the park. It was all quality stuff.”

Paper sculptor Martha Chatelain also praised festival organizers.

“I liked the fact that the juried art show didn’t charge a fee and yet gave a large cash award,” Chatelain said Tuesday. “Having a tent for the art was nice.”

Chatelain applauded the festival committee for continually “reaching for the high end with the San Diego Symphony and the fine arts tent.”

In the juried art exhibit, cash prizes were awarded in an open division; there was a Peninsula division for community artists in painting and sculpture. Nodelman won in the open painting division and Salvador Gonzales won in the open sculpture division.

The open division’s first-, second- and third-place painters and sculptors received $1,000, $500 and $250 awards respectively. The prizes for Peninsula division painters and sculptors were $500, $250 and $100.