Lion starts Scarecrow Festival off with a roar
As some artists and festival organizers scurried around in the late-September Indian-summer heat, installing sculptures for the monthlong Cambria Scarecrow Festival that officially starts Saturday, Oct. 1, one large creation was already in place.
For a couple of weeks, Terry Camp’s tribute to the late Cecil the Lion has been reclining regally on a faux grass bed atop a bright red table at Cambria Nursery.
“People at the nursery are taking care of Cecil,” Camp said gratefully Monday, Sept. 26, about loving attention which could include covering the lion if the weather report includes fog, drizzle or rain — moisture and a completed papier-mache sculpture don’t mix well.
Camp’s elaborate lion sculpture is one of hundreds of artworks that will be on display in Cambria, Harmony and San Simeon for the entire month of October.
Various themes are evident in the exhibits, according to organizers. Most of the displays are mounted outdoors in business districts.
Festival founder Taylor Hilden said with a smile Monday that, in honor of Cambria’s sesquicentennial (150th anniversary), this year’s festival is honoring North Coast pioneer families which have many descendants still living in the area.
With that theme, she wrote in an email interview, “you will see a lot more ‘traditional scarecrows,’ with straw sticking out in lots of places.”
Accenting that rural and agricultural theme are several Cow Parade SLO sculptures of life-sized cows, which will remain on display for seven months before being auctioned off in May.
The countywide display, part of an international movement, was spearheaded by Alan Vander Horst, owner of the 1-block town of Harmony, to honor his family’s dairying heritage.
Cecil
When Camp began building his Cecil sculpture in the spring, he said he was inspired by the death of a much-revered Southwest African lion in Zimbabwe.
The shooting of Cecil the Lion by an American recreational hunter in July 2015 had sparked worldwide outrage from a vast swath of people, from animal conservationists and politicians to celebrities and ordinary people mourning the loss of a treasured animal.
Creating the sculpture for the festival was Camp’s first foray into building a scarecrow, or, for that matter, building much of anything else in the way of models or artwork.
Camp hadn’t assembled so much as a model airplane for more than 30 years. So scarecrow building was creatively inspiring but daunting, including as it did brainstorming and solitary designing, studying, sketches, diagrams, measurements, plywood, cardboard, chicken wire, papier-mache mash, gesso, taxidermy eyes and more.
If the artist was apprehensive at the outset, he’s hooked on the process now. Camp said Monday, Sept. 26, that he’s already planning his sculptures for next year’s festival … maybe based on storybook characters, he mused.
This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 9:30 AM with the headline "Lion starts Scarecrow Festival off with a roar."