Street art: 27th St. Charles Fine Art Show entices with dreamlike wonder

Darting between booths toward the “Paint-A-Car” zone, children were told something you don’t always hear at a fine arts show.

“Don’t be afraid to touch and pet the art,” Anna Winette Repke said to kids approaching her textured wool portraits at the 27th annual St. Charles Fine Art Show. “Experience it in your own way, let the beauty pull you in.”

Repurposing. Re-invention. Inspiration from the everyday unorthodox were on display with more than 110 local, national, and international artists drawing in inquisitive art-show-goers along Riverside Avenue in downtown St. Charles on May 24 and 25.

Carved jade jewelry steeped in Chinese lore, flower-dappled Monet visages painted onto peeled bark birch, golf putters shaped from blown glass, surreal characters born from cypress roots and palm ferns.

Repke, from Chillicothe, said, with the diversity of art forms being displayed, she was proud to awaken people to the beauty and fun of wool art.

“So many people tell me they’ve never seen anything like it before,” Repke said. “It’s never boring, you can go in so many creative directions with wool fiber. Whatever you can imagine you can bring to life. I’m always adding new ideas into my works, like dimensional flower petals for my hummingbirds to really make the nature scene alive.”

Displaying her pine-tree-laden wool purse to visitors, Repke said with wool art, the fun is in the process.

She explained how she colorfully dyes her own wool, even once tending sheep herself. Once dried, she rubs the fuzzy wool into a felt fabric. Using a felting needle, she pokes in background details, bringing vivid nature scenery forth. Picturesque trees and their web-like roots balance the ecosystems for the stitched wildlife to call home.

While Repke honed her craft over years, behind her booth fresh young artists were grabbing brushes and paints, trying out their artistic flourishes at the “Paint-A-Car” activity zone.

Hosted by the Pottawatomie Garden Club, now in their 97th year of beautifying downtown St. Charles, “Paint-A-Car” allowed children armed with paintbrushes, to transform a shiny Jeep into a kaleidoscope of color fit for the Louvre.

“Kids have loved it, some parents even joined in, with a grandfather painting the Eiffel Tower on the Jeep,” Connie Unger, president of the Pottawatomie Garden Club, said while handing out paint and brushes to the kids. “The Jeep is a collaborative effort like how we transformed Pottawatomie Park together as a community. It’s our organization’s duty to give back to the community that’s given us so much.”

Throughout the year, the organization hosts community events, such as planting around the downtown bridges, and even provides two $3,500 scholarships to graduating high school seniors or early college students.

“If you want to get involved with friendly people who really know their flowers and gardening, this is the place you want to be,” Unger said. “It’s all about giving back to the community, donating your time, and having fun along the way.”

With strumming acoustic guitars permeating the air from Flagship on the Fox and Pollyanna Brewing & Distilling, visitors marveled at the technicality of expression in infrared-captured photography, fire-shaped ceramics, mythological Greek sculptures and modern art painted to entice the dream-like subconscious.

For Aurora sculptor Skeeter Aschinger, the genesis of her dream-like characters are born just by walking through nature and becoming inspired by uniquely-shaped pieces of wood.

With her art shaped from fallen palm tree seed pods and ferns, and the knees of cypress trees, Aschinger said her winter walks in Florida teem with characters calling out to her.

“As an artist, you have to constantly be scouting for inspiration,” Aschinger said. “I came across an interesting cypress knee with two points, and in my mind I saw a child and her mother. Another became a married couple. You have to visualize your creativity and then follow it. Any unique piece of wood, I can imagine faces and arms and hidden characters.”

Aschinger steams the recycled wood, peeling the bark off before painting her formally-attired characters. She then fingers resin fiberglass clay into hats and heads for her people, conveying motion and expressions.

“Everyone has so many things in their mind that they can create,” Aschinger said. “If you follow your imagination, little details help the characters come to life, giving them individual characteristics. I can be driving down the highway and be inspired by a piece of wood on the side of the road. You have to train yourself to constantly be looking, you have to be willing to see.”