Hot Art

The second Saturday evening each month in St. Petersburg the city holds the Artwalk.  Forty studios around town open up for 4 hours to visitors to view, experience, and buy their art. The city has a free bus service that covers the disbursed group of studios. I quickly realized that there was no way all of these could be visited in one or two visits. So the Turk and I focused on one area so we could check out the experience.

all handblown glass

First, it was hot. Not warm. Not balmy. Just hot. So that trolley came in handy. And the heat became an issue when we visited the Duncan McClellan Glass  studio where we could watch them make glass, in a hot oven, in the hot evening air.! But they had amazing pieces there from many different artists.

a heat source, in addition to the sun

examples of some of the amazing glass at this gallery

Of course the Turk was more fascinated by the garden around this studio compound. This is because there were huge mango trees with the largest mangos he's evern seen.

extremely large mangos EVERYWHERE

beautiful glass art in the gardens

 And I was fascinated with the succulent wall in the patio area.

why cant my succulents look like this?!

We headed over to the Morean Arts Center located in an old train station. There were many artists located here and we saw mostly different styles of pottery work. Outside of the station was an large area where a number of kilns are located. One of them was HUGE!

Not an ancient ruin. This is a huge kiln.

And of course I found pigs!  I like the sense of whimsy of this artist. 

Pigs with instructions

Overall we enjoyed the experience and will do it again, when it gets a bit cooler. We discovered areas of St. Pete we didnt know about. I saw so many little restaurants to try that I dont have enough St. Pete days to try them all. And there are so many breweries!  We'll be back.