A Seeing-Red Period for Laguna Artists
Don’t know why, but it always amuses me to think of the Laguna Beach High School athletic teams as “the Artists.”
Not very ferocious sounding, is it? The name reflects the town’s aesthetic bent, but it’s hard to picture a band of Artists, no matter how plucky, who wouldn’t feel severely mismatched when asked to take on foes like the Wolverines or Vikings or Cougars.
It could be worse, I guess. They could be the Laguna Beach Finger Painters.
Maybe it’d be better, says a friend who lives there, if they were called “the Fighting Artists.”
Fighting Artists sounds like an oxymoron, but the way things are going on the streets and meeting rooms of Laguna Beach these days, maybe not.
Could we be looking at a long, hot summer in this cool and breezy town?
The normally placid artistic community is at least partly up in arms over the prospect of moving its historic Festival of the Arts to San Clemente.
To some, that borders on heresy. The festival has set up shop for the last 68 years and is as characteristic to the city’s face as Groucho Marx’s mustache was to his.
But the festival board and the city are arguing over rents from the annual two-month summer festival, and the artists who display their wares feel caught in a political pincers movement.
Laguna Beach painter Michael Lavery says the board hasn’t kept the artists informed about the dispute. Meanwhile, he says, the city has made life increasingly tough for street artists such as himself as it caters more and more to established galleries that pay big rents and, understandably, feel threatened by individuals who sell wares on the streets or in parks.
More Spunk Than the Average Artist
All of which has left some artists--dare I say--fighting mad.
“The board is using the artists as pawns, no doubt about it,” says Lavery, who may have more spunk than the average artist. “When you come into Laguna Beach, the sign says, ‘Home of the Pageant of the Masters and the Festival of the Arts.’ That’s our statement. This would be like ripping the Hall of Fame out of Cooperstown.”
All that’s happened so far is the festival board’s decision to open negotiations with San Clemente, which sounds like a willing suitor for the tourist-rich festival. The festival’s lease with Laguna Beach extends to September of 2001.
My question to Lavery: Will the two-front war generate among Laguna’s artists the fighting spirit they may need?
“Their livelihood is now at stake,” he says. “I think it’s gotten their ire up; it’s rubbed them the wrong way and they’re mad as hell. I used to play baseball, so I have a duality to me. I can be incredibly smooth and use finesse with a brush, or I can run over the catcher if I’m trying to score the winning run.”
He had his chance to prove that last fall, and he backed up his talk. Lavery, 41 and a 15-year resident of Laguna, had been painting and selling his works in Heisler Park all that time without being hassled, he says.
Then, police invoked an old ordinance and cited him for selling art on public property. He was willing to go to court over it, but the city backed down at the last minute and Lavery won something of a public victory.
It remains to see how emboldened his fellow artists will be in the months ahead.
“I think artists are determined individuals,” he says. “We wouldn’t be artists if we weren’t. A lot of us have gone though a lot of hard times to get where we are, so we’re not going to roll over.”
He pictures Laguna’s citizenry rising up to save its artists’ colony, locking arms with the artists themselves.
We’ll see. I’m not sure artists realize just how rough these political fights can get.
They may be comforted looking to their left and right and seeing their fellow artists fighting alongside.
If it were me, I’d feel safer with Wolverines or Vikings.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.