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So Saturday night hits and all of my plans have quietly blown themselves to tiny bits… leaving me free to take a quick run up to the Heights for Mitch Cohen’s First Saturday Arts Market. I was actually hoping to catch a couple of friends exhibiting there, but that part of my luck wasn’t on. Got to meet some new artists, though, so it’s all good.

I hadn’t heard Alexis Moore before, and was reasonably blown away…. but as I don’t have sound here, I’m just going to point you to her website. Go thou and be smitten. Smited. Whatever.

Wandered on… even with the sun going down, this is Houston in July. I wanted SHADE.

And further in, I found shade and a fellow bookbinder, Amie Krebbs, who works in recycled cardboard and hemp (and other stuff) to create some very impressive art “Gournals.” (Don’t correct her spelling. It’s not a mistake.)

She’s self-taught, as I am, but it appears she’s much more creative about it… These Gournals are art; my journals are simply handwriting storage. And she’s mastered that tape binding, which I never have. I’m just slightly envious, though not enough to actually DO anything about it….

Wandered further yet, looking at photographs and soaps and jewelry and painting and pottery and scents (Mitch goes for variety, and very conveniently provides a list of artists for the terribly curious) and ended up catching a lesson in enameling technique from one Mary Jarvis, who paused a conversation with friend and boothmate Chris Magisano of Maggie’s Meltdown to explain to me the differences between cloisonné enamel, with which I was familiar, and champlevé enamel, a very old technique which manages to be completely new to me.

The circular piece on the display in front of Mary is cloisonné.

This is champlevé.

(The difference, for the curious, has to do with how the frame of the piece is built. Beyond that the explanation gets a little complicated. I’m not sure I understand it well enough to explain without drawings and photographs with circles and arrows….)

Around another corner was one Brett G. Hall, who says he wanted to be an artist for 30 years, but he went into the commercial side of the field and got caught up in that whole “making a living” thing. Now he’s doing the only thing he ever wanted to do – drawing. (But unless I’m way wrong he likes talking about it, too.)

Several of the pieces Brett showed were done with colored pencil on a colored paper, with highlights popped out in opaque white pencil. It’s a very appealing approach.

Made one more pass through the market (photojournalists are somewhat like sharks – we keep moving or we drown) and ran across John Delafield, the potter who made my late night coffee mug (the one that could double as a beer stein). He was having a very good evening, and said he’d sold all the “special” ware he’d made for the market, and a bunch of other stuff too. Always good to see him; he does wonderful work…. simple, solid, utilitarian. It’s not “fine china” but if you drop it it’s more likely to break your foot (or your floor) than crack itself. That’s my kind of work.

By this time it was getting on to closing, so there was just enough light left to grab a couple of shots of “Grifters and Shills.” It’s modern folk in the classic political/cultural tradition…

And then, one last trip past the H-Town StrEATS food truck…

And it was time to go home….