Artomatic 2016

Today K and I had a delightful suburban adventure. We decided to go out to an art festival called Artomatic. It's an annual festival that runs on the weekends through November into early December. It seems to be a place where anyone can display their art - in fact we saw at least two exhibition panels with art from local middle schools!

But before I get ahead of myself - on our way out of town, we realized we were too hungry to wait until we arrived at Park Potomac so I did a quick scan of restaurants along our route (there's this new feature on Google maps that is awesome) - and we chose to stop at Mrs. K's Restaurant and Barrel Bar. It is an adorable stone house that used to be a tollhouse in Montgomery County, Maryland. It was converted to Mrs. K's Tollhouse Restaurant in 1930. In fact, hanging in the lobby is a newpaper article from 1941 praising the colonial dress of the wait staff and delicious food :)

Our waiter did not wear colonial dress, but had a lovely little blue bowtie. The food, however, certainly lives up to the reputation. We had the Saturday two-course brunch - we both chose the Maryland crab soup for appetizer and I had succulent and spicy shrimp and andouille sausage with grits as my main course. It was such a delightful indulgence and set us up well on our path to the art fair.

K and I have been thinking about art for our home but had not yet picked out anything together, so this was our first opportunity. We discussed a couple of ideas - nothing too figurative, prefer colors that will match/enhance the color scheme of white blue and tan in our living room, etc.

Instead, we bought a gorgeous rainbow cityscape by Jay Yirenkyi!!!!

When we turned the corner and saw the piece, we both gasped. We knew instantly that it was the right piece for us and immediately emailed the artist. But then we pushed ourselves to continue walking around and look at the rest of the show. We took our time and sat down to discuss whether we were ready to make the investment and ultimately, made that choice and went to paypal! We won't get the piece until after the show closes in December but in the meantime, we met an artist named Cheryl Ann Bearrs who was so enthusiastic and warm that we were inspired to pick up a couple of her beautiful abstract pieces for our dining room.

There were a lot of beautiful pieces throughout the Artomatic - and because the show is uncurated, there is a huge variety of art, style, personality. If you're in the DC/Maryland area - go check it out!