GRAND RAPIDS, Mich — This time of year, thousands of people flock to West Michigan to enjoy ArtPrize pieces that people have been spending months, or maybe even years, working on. But it’s not too often that you get to see artists create their masterpieces right before your very eyes.
The Creston Neighborhood Association offered art lovers that very opportunity on Wednesday night. Creston Brewery’s upstairs venue “Golden Age” hosted Art Bash for Creston 2023.
“They have live artists that paint during the entire event. So at the end, they take these paintings and then they auction them off. All proceeds go towards the community, just to keep making the Creston neighborhood the best,” said event coordinator Amanda Zilke.
“My favorite thing to do is to walk around and to take a photo of the paintings at the beginning of the event. I try to get one in the middle, and then I try to do it again at the end of it too, just to get a little bit of the whole process.”
Typically Art Bash includes eight artists, but this year 12 of them were painting. Among them was Christina Hutton, who is a muralist but hadn’t touched a canvas in quite some time before Art Bash.
“It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for the last five years. I knew I wanted to get back into it. I had the paints, I had everything. Just do it,” she said.
Because of her experience with murals, Hutton is used to people watching her while she’s working so she said she felt comfortable at the event.
“This is actually quite lovely, like the small, intimate [atmosphere]. Usually I have people yelling at me because I'm up on a ladder and a lift, so this is this is really a nice, kind of intimate conversation whereas usually have to yell down,” she said.
On Wednesday, Christina painted an Eastern Bluebird on a pink background.
"In my murals, I actually paint Michigan native plants and species. I'm really into endangered and threatened species, but this was just something pretty that I see often on my walks with my dogs, so I wanted to incorporate that," she said.
The Creston Neighborhood Association will be back at Creston Brewery in December when the Lights On Creston event returns. There will be more than 25 different artists and vendors selling their goods upstairs and outside of the brewery there will be a trolley taking people from business to business.
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