Dogs Downtown experience captured for attendees through caricatures
Sep. 23—ROCHESTER — Dogs and their owners gathered in Central Park in Rochester for Dogs Downtown despite the unfavorable weather leading up to the event on Saturday, Sept. 23.
The morning was filled with rain, but the weather cleared up before the event began. Many dog owners and their furry friends gathered for a variety of activities at the event.
Dogs Downtown featured more than two dozen vendors around the park. There was also a pop-up dog park, agility course, doggie pools, a live DJ and a photo booth. However, the highlight of the day was the free pet caricature artists who traveled from the Twin Cities to provide cartoon-like drawings for attendees and their pets.
Dozens of pet owners and their dogs consistently lined up outside Pete and Dian Wagners' tent, waiting for their own personalized drawing of them with their dogs. Each drawing only takes a few minutes and offers a simplistic, yet accurate cartoon depiction of the dogs and their owners.
The Wagners have been doing caricatures for decades. Both of them have a talent for caricature art, but Dian also spends her time doing more serious mediums of art. Pete, on the other hand, has also been pursuing comic-style art with humor and satire mixed in.
"My first-grade report card said, 'Peter is a talented little artist who reveals a clever sense of humor in his work,'" said Pete. "That was my first-grade report, so I always did caricatures."
Pete worked as a political cartoonist at City Pages before retiring from that field in 1992. His editor at the time did not see eye to eye with him and lacked the same sense of humor Pete displayed through his work, leading him to pursue caricature art instead, he said.
"A true caricature is funny. It's not supposed to be a realistic depiction of anything," Pete said. "Nowadays there are so many artists who are really not cut out for caricaturing but are opportunists and they go out and they pretend to be caricaturists and they do these really boring drawings or they take forever, which a true caricaturist doesn't."
Each person Pete draws only takes him a minute and a half to two minutes. It takes Dian a little longer than him, but her work is true caricatures and still fairly fast.
Currently, he mostly does caricature work with preschools in the summer. Pete especially likes working with children because the simplistic, yet accurate art form of caricatures resonates strongly with the younger ages.
"It took a long time to figure out how to do it for the really little toddlers," said Pete. "I've found there are ways to show them and oh my god they enjoy it so much when I can do it in that way for them. I just love entertaining kids. It's so fun to draw them because I think they especially like the way I draw and my ability to draw really simple but where it's really on target."
Pete also loves to attend events where he can draw dogs and their owners.
Kathryn Frye was one of the attendees who sat down with her dog Ollie to get their caricature done. Ollie was a rescue dog from a North Dakota reservation who was rescued with 300 other dogs by Coco's Heart Dog Rescue out of Somerset, Wisconsin. Ollie was filled with energy and excitement throughout the drawing which matched the joy of Frye when she saw the finished product of her and her two-and-a-half-year-old dog.
The Rochester Downtown Alliance holds this event annually and dog owners can look forward to it again next year.
