Chalk Artists Draw a Crowd at Sidewalk Festival in Pasadena

Take 25,000 sticks of colored chalk, put them in the hands of nearly 600 artists and assign them plots of sidewalk on a busy, sun-drenched plaza.

Invite spectators to wander among the artists at no charge, add some live music and, there you have it -- the annual Pasadena Chalk Festival.

Billed by its organizers as “the world’s largest street-painting festival,” the sidewalk art fest opened its weekend run Saturday, attracting students and hobbyists as well as professional artists.

“This is for fun,” said Sasha Karlova, a student at Fairfax High School’s Visual Arts magnet program, as she created a fanciful character that looked as if he might have stepped off an alien spaceship.

“It’s the end of the school year, so there is nothing stressful on our minds,” she said, explaining why she and her classmates turned out for the festival, now in its 14th year.

A few squares away on the plaza at Paseo Colorado shopping mall, across from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Peggy Jordan of Arleta and her daughters were hoping their creation would raise public awareness of the violence and famine in the Darfur region of Sudan in Africa.

“What’s happening there is genocide,” Jordan said as she chalked a portrait of a sad-eyed mother and her child, working from a news photo clipped from The Times. “It’s too easy for people to look the other way.” A basket with fliers urging people to “Help End Ethnic Cleansing in Darfur” sat next to the artwork.

Like many others who attended or participated in the festival, Jordan wore shorts and a tank top, while one of her daughters took refuge from the 94-degree heat under one of the large umbrellas set up nearby.

Janine Cortez of La Puente used her allotted space to honor the memory of her great-grandmother, who died a year ago at 107.

“We took care of her at home until she died,” Cortez said, working carefully from a photo of her great-grandmother as a young woman. The black-and-white photo showed a pretty woman in a satiny, white-collared dress with a flower at the waist.

“She taught us how to unite as a family,” said Cortez, who was making her second appearance at the festival. Last year, urged by friends to give chalk art a try, she created a replica of a work by Salvador Dali.

Among the jungle animals, giant pink snails, flowers, children’s cartoon characters and other images in various stages of completion, video-game artist Javier Harriman was trying his hand with the decidedly low-tech medium of chalk.

As his young family sat beside him, munching on burgers, Harriman concentrated on an elaborate rendering of the Mayan god Itzamna.

“It’s like performance art,” he said of the experience of creating something transitory while scores of onlookers watch.

“I like the feeling.... You experience it by being there,” Harriman said.

The free festival continues today from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Colorado Boulevard between Marengo and Los Robles avenues.