This photo of me was taken by Steve at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice. Actress Kyra Knightly is at the next table.
  
Kevin
 

9.1.07 From kenvankampen@yahoo,.com 

thank you penny its the last day for them and me and we are all pooped. until next time ken

PennyVK@aol.com wrote:
So honored to receive your first email!  Hello from Minneapolis!  Glad to see you are in such good company!  I hope you are having fun!  Hi Pat and Kelly.  I was thinking of you today!
 
 
In a message dated 8/31/2007 9:28:13 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, kenvankampen@yahoo.com writes:
Hi! Penny at all to your next party where i hope with the help with kelly and patty am writing my very first e-mail.

8.27.07 From Rick : FYI.  Chad's basement last Thursday night. Ouch!

first year ever entered, gets accepted

art piece placed front and center

gets a ribbon (not easy to do)

wins only children's choice award,

 how do you top that?

9.6.07 From Karen:  Fame AND Fortune!  We are so proud! 

8.29.07 Family comments:

 

CONGRATULATIONS.    The owl was a great hit at the fair. We went on Friday and just watched all the people come into the building and stop dead in their tracks. Then they would go over to the owl, walk around it, smile, and admire. It was a great hit and it is a great piece of art.

Dave (Walsh)

From: Rita panton [mailto:redegret@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 4:44 PM
To: dpanton@qwest.net; Dave Walsh; pennyvk@aol.com; rszudy@gmail.com; claire
Subject: Owl receives Kid's Choice Award

 

wooohooo!! one hundred bucks

 

Kolin - Very Cool Rita....   Nice work

Dale - Now that you've been intrigued by one picture, here's a link to a set of shots Adam took on opening night of the State Fair Art Exhibition (for artists and family, because the Fair did not open until 2 days later).  You can see the actual size of this piece, which weighs a considerable amount and has to be assembled from many layered segments.  You can also see Penny and a pregnant Claire, who were the primary promoters of Rita entering this piece.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boyorastroboy/sets/72157601611810795/

Kathleen - Rita, it's a HOOOOOT!  The title is neat too. (Sight in Darkness)

Job - Congratulations Rita!!!   Up the Price!!!!!!

Steve and Pauline - Greetings to everyone from Venice, Italy.  We are here with Kevin, Pattie, Pat, and Kelly reading your emails about Rita's success.  We are very proud to have another artist in the family.  Keep up the good work!!
 
Karen - Peter, Thanks so much for your kind remarks. Rita's name, along with a description of the owl, was in the print version of the article which appeared in the STAR/Tribune.  There were 1900 submissions and 300+ were chosen. It is great to see owl "in person."  It has a personality all its own. On Saturday Dale and I went to the Fair and watched people come into the art building where the owl is the first piece one sees.  People would look over the owl, check out the talons and then smile at the owl, making some connection.   It is made of earthenware, terracotta, like flower pots.  It is either 4 or 5 pieces stacked on top of one another like a stack of donuts. 

Thais - Incredible work.....I am impressed!
Whooooo would have 'thunk' it!!!!
Ok....it's late, and maybe that isn't so funny after all??!

Mary - Congratulations on your excellent owl....I bet Grandma Jean is very pleased with it. Will be interested to talk to you about the material, size etc.  Hi to Adam.........Mary

Peter - Easily the Best of Show
Very Cool, congratulations, very proud to know this artist.
peter

Kathleen - Awesome!

__________________________________

8.24.07 The State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition gets surreal.

By Doug Hanson, Special to the Star Tribune

 
STATE FAIR FINE ARTS EXHIBITION

Where: Fine Arts Center, Machinery Hill, State Fairgrounds.

 
Wander through the State Fair and you're guaranteed some delightfully surreal moments, even off the midway. But this year you can double your dose of dreamlike strangeness by visiting the Fair's Fine Arts Exhibition, where a giantess slumbers atop downtown St. Paul rooftops, a farmyard rooster struts inside a bottle and a cloud-dotted sky shines from inside a dim barn.

The flights of fantasy brighten a solid exhibit that also features a large number of photos. Photography submissions have been growing steadily year after year, with almost 40 percent of this year's record-setting 1,901 submissions being photos. Judges selected 371 artworks for the show, also a record.

The bottled rooster, an acrylic by Maria Arrazola, took first prize in painting. And René Magritte himself would have approved of the bright slice of sky inside James Bakkom's somberly painted barn. Pamela Belding's magical painted collage shows a Civic-Center-sized woman, a vision from some old fairy tale, dozing on pillows that rest against the rooftops of downtown St. Paul as giant fireflies flit about.

John Largaespada used sophisticated computer photo processing to give a bulging, cartoony look to a woman happily tending to a roomful of ferrets. Allen Brewer painted his bizarre, symbolic paradise inside the rosette ovals of an old wood church window, and Philip Thompson's enthroned demon lord of war is refined and scary.

Captivating mixed media, photography

Julie Allen applied powerfully saturated color to intensify her watercolor world of Chinese checkers, dice and marbles. Ceramics range from Ron Gallas' shallow bowl, edged with nice ribbon-like effects, to a huge and stolid earthenware owl by Rita Panton. Equally eye-catching is Daniel Volenec's giant drawing of an old woman's craggy, almost reptilian, face. It benefits from its unusual combination of charcoal, wax and pastel.

Textiles provide a rich vehicle for abstract work such as Barbara Martinson's light and colorful symphony of rectilinear forms on quilted cotton. A mixed-media, 3-D photo collage by John Roy crowds together old cars, motorcycles, bars, gas pumps and road signs into a gritty homage to the now-junked roadside world of decades past. Area printmakers submitted a meager 43 works this year, 10 of which are in the show. Of note is Pamela Carberry's collagraph showing intimate, minutely observed expanses of grass and water.

Standout photos include Sarah Knoss' crisply composed bathroom corner of blinds, shades, walls and closet doors. Mark Paulson captured spring snow melted to reveal a watery shape that resembles a stretching female torso -- a metaphor for nature awakening from a long winter. And Osama Esid's three dryly humorous, hand-colored photos pose humble workers in front of theater backdrops of tropical scenes.

A small photo by Marine Cpl. Brian Dorff evokes the confusion of the Iraq war with its jumble of legs, boots, torsos and military equipment crammed into a small space. War photographer Robert Capa once said that if your photo isn't good enough, you're not close enough. You can't get closer than this visceral image.

Some Iraq-inspired images suggest melancholy or resignation. Jackie Karon's gouache shows a U.S. Marine seated on the hood of his battered jeep, looking down in grief. Kris Ann Prince paints a blocky, naive, but affecting image of seven uniformed pallbearers carrying a flag-draped coffin.

American flags appear often, most prominently at the exhibit entrance in a large photo collage by Jamie Marie Jansen. It portrays a boy seated by a grave in a veterans' cemetery, holding up a big flag that has been fragmented and reassembled in disjointed, cubist sections, perhaps implying the country's disharmony. A mythic harmony asserts itself in a photo by Nicholas Felice showing Old Glory next to a brawny Superman statue viewed from above and behind. This hero from simpler times looks out protectively over the bucolic main street of Metropolis, Ill.

As major camera manufacturers market their high-end digital single-lens reflex cameras to an ever-wider audience, what once was a refrigerator snapshot now can be an exhibit photo. But image sharpness and print quality too often replace an original vision, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the lucky amateur who culled one great shot from a thousand and a dedicated photographer developing an artistic body of work.

Still, a good photo is a good photo -- and perhaps there's no better place to debate these points than at the democratic, free-for-all atmosphere of the Fine Arts Exhibition.

And where else can the surrealism of the midway funhouse find its match?

http://www.startribune.com/10136/gallery/1372484.html   <--See photo in the Star Tribune newspaper

Doug Hanson writes frequently about the visual arts.