Chalk One Up for Festivals : Arborfest, Asphalt Art Draw Crowds

Find an empty parking lot on a sunny day, borrow a European tradition, add smudges of Americana and call it a festival.

The Festa dell’ Arte attracted more than 100 artists and hundreds more onlookers to the hot asphalt at Cal State Fullerton for the second annual fall street painting festival. The weekend festival was piggybacked by the Arborfest across campus at the Fullerton Arboretum. Both festivals end this afternoon.

Chalk reproductions of Salvador Dali’s work, Guns ‘N Roses album covers and the Simpsons characters dominated the asphalt canvas in front of the university’s art school.

“This is really an old European tradition,” said Jerry Samuelson, dean of the arts school at Fullerton. “The artists are doing it for the love of doing art.”

Most artists said that drawing on a parking lot is just as easy as drawing on paper.

“This is my first time” using asphalt as a medium, said Emigdio Vasquez, an artist from Orange best known for his billboard-sized murals. “You get used to it.”

Vasquez was working on a portrait of farm labor activist Cesar Chavez and three Chicano laborers.

His chalk mural “documents the contribution of Chicano working class to the economy of Southern California,” Vasquez said. It depicted a woman bent over in a field picking vegetables, a man in a straw hat, and a miner wearing a dirty helmet.

“My father worked as a miner in Arizona, so I represented him in this painting,” he said.

Artists worked on their knees using kneepads, chalk, brushes and hand-held vacuum cleaners to clear the chalk dust. The artists were stained with chalk dust of all colors.

“I could have done a pretty picture,” said one student artist, “but this is a great place to make a statement.” Her image incorporated the scales of justice and flames of fire. But the political messages were drowned out by scenes from children’s books, flowers, birds and at least four tributes to Dr. Seuss, the author of “The Cat in the Hat” and “Green Eggs and Ham” who died recently.

“I always loved his books,” said Randy Repass, a senior arts major at Cal State Fullerton. “He has really great things to say.”

Other artists were less experienced but just as dedicated.

“The kids were so excited,” said Maria Monzon, leader of Girl Scout Troop 1951, who watched her 17 girls work for four hours. “They decided to paint an ice cream cone because their troop name tags are cut into the shape of a pink ice cream cone.”

They finished the ice cream cone by noon and the troop spent the afternoon comparing their work to the competition and playing in the sun.

The street painting festival was a test for some.

On his knees on the hot asphalt, the sun beating down on his neck, Young Jo Kim, a senior arts major at the university, said his contribution was his final exam for a single-credit mural painting course.

“There is some pressure,” Kim said. “My teacher is right here watching over me.”

He was reproducing an image of a parrot he had taken from a biology book. He had to work around a deep crack in the asphalt which sliced through the bird.

“I have had to take lots of breaks because of my knees, and it is a hot day,” he said. Across campus, the Arborfest attracted scores of families to the Arboretum. There, festival organizers re-created a pastoral scene by including a sty of pigs, chickens and sheep for children to pet and featuring huge metal contraptions to make apple juice.