Some things barely need to be mentioned about this year's Cherry Creek Arts Festival, held July 1-3. The festival was celebrating its tenth anniversary. It's one of the largest and most prestigious art festivals in the nation. Many corporate and local sponsors funded it. Most people who really want to know these things read the promotional literature while strolling the festival streets.

What brings people--throngs, crowds, bottlenecks of people--out into the hot July sun to view art and eat expensive, albeit delicious, little lunch foods at restaurant vendor booths? The festival attracts an unusual art crowd: parents with very young children, pillar-of-the community matrons. And although nobody paid an entrance fee except the artists ($450 a booth, according to one), the art-lovers probably shelled out a lot of money in "sundries," since $5 was the average price of a little snack and there wasn't a drink to be had for under $2.50.

One obvious, and uncharitable, answer as to why people flock to Cherry Creek examines the commercial aspect of the festival. Some people may come solely for the unique shopping. At certain booths, bodies strained to get a look at original jewelry, wooden furniture, and ceramics. One woman, approaching an artist who creates finely-draped, unusually colored robes in velvet, asked, "But where can I wear this?"

However, undercurrents exist within the festival. Although several artists commented that much of the art at Cherry Creek was "safe," Go-Go found a few artists with more challenging pieces to talk about their work and the space created by the festival.

KEBA ARMAND KONTE

Keba Konte's images stopped people as they walked past the corner of Second and Detroit. Huge faces stared at the passerby out of rough slabs of wood. There is no getting around the race issue: nearly every portrait or other image in Konte's collection of photomontage depicts a black person, and he was one of the few non-white artists at the show. His booth seemed to be a magnet for African-Americans at the show, while drawing large crowds from other persuasions as well.

More intriguing is the care that Konte puts into his bold, expressive figures. "I like to show beauty in unexpected places," he said, perhaps referring to his images of a boy ecstatically leaping over an urban war zone, complete with smog and barbed wire. "I like to give dignity to my subjects."

Influenced by Paul Andrews of South Carolina, Konte traveled the world, photographing people in Japan, Africa, Cuba, and the U.S. He now finds large, flat, unconventional wooden surfaces --headboards, the bottoms of drawers-- and transfers the images onto them with a gel. With only the black parts of the photos left behind, he uses paint and a burning technique to cement the image to the board.

The final, glazed wooden pieces arrest the eye. Although some of the boards are painted before he begins, most are left in their natural wood color. As a result, the photographic figures share the color of their "dead space" with their backgrounds or their surroundings. Far from diminishing the figures, this makes them larger, a part of their world.

Several works included elements of collage. One, "Short Road to Resurrection," featured an angry-looking young man striding down a road, surrounded by nails hammered into the board. Others used hand-colored photo images as little windows or jewels cut out from the main portrait, looking like windows into the head of the figure.

Konte started producing these photomontages in 1997. He started his artistry by following the example of his mother, who photographs portraits, and he studied photojournalism in college.

"[The purpose of this festival] is to bring fine artists and craftsmen to the people without the barrier of a gallery, which is often not a very welcoming environment," he said. "Then, for the artists, it's a venue where we can sell directly to collectors. It nurtures new collectors, without the venue of a gallery, which traditionally gets 50%."

As a result, Konte said, "there's a lot of very safe work here. People invest a lot to be in the show, so there's commercial pressure. The same standards of five or ten years ago are in place--what sold last year will sell this year." "Safe," according to Konte, means non-threatening, non-challenging.

The upside, Konte says, is that for two or three days, a quarter of a million people view his work, and he talks to thousands. "The artist is there," he said. His work also is not tied up for months, as it would be in a gallery.

DAVID MCKIRDY

Poised in the center of a little side street, one booth held no representational or functional art whatsoever. Instead, the framed works inside David McKirdy's white tent mesmerized viewers with their simple, repetitive patterns. To make them, he burned through layers of parchment with simple shapes, along a grid pattern. He then overlaid and separated the perforated pieces, adding a depth that creates dazzling optical effects as viewers move around the work.

"I would rather stop someone's mind than engage it," McKirdy said of his work. "I want to stop them from thinking for just one second."

He uses neither images nor color; the only variation in tone in his pieces comes from the color of the burned paper. There were four different patterns on paper in his work at the festival: a simple grid or field of one kind of burn-mark; a field in which one piece of paper was rotated 90 degrees, giving the long, narrow burn marks a woven look; grids with two sizes of marks, reminiscent of circuitry; and thicker, more heavily-burned pieces, made by burning marks through more layers of paper. The paper itself is glassine, which is a thin, acid-free paper. Its translucence adds to the optical effect of the pieces.

The work, McKirdy said, shares themes with Islamic architecture, which often features perforated screens in front of buildings to create interesting light patterns.

Although his work is very unusual for a festival setting, McKirdy finds his willingness to depart from the norm one of the great aspects of showing his art at Cherry Creek. "Sales are the common denominator for everybody here. But what's interesting is that here is an opportunity to bring good contemporary work to a public audience. This is an equally valid venue, [compared to] a museum or gallery. The viewers are the same, except perhaps in education."

This story is dedicated to Charles Yurchak of the Dragon's Light Herb Company, who was kind enough to give me a pad of paper when I ran out while covering this story. He also gave me an elixir to improve my blood, and told me that I think too much.