Art Walk on Pratt Street
Hartford
Aug. 30, 2025
Have you ever wondered what the professional artists do with the paintings they make while you and your pals are getting tipsy at a paint and sip? Turns out that they keep them just like the rest of us, but theirs are good enough to sell.
I learned that Saturday at Art Walk. Organized by local artist Alexander Ogbonna, the event brought together artists and vendors to Pratt Street in downtown Hartford. There, budding patrons of the arts had the opportunity to support visual artists, knitters and weavers, jewelers and other creatives.
That’s what brought Anna Ruggiero out to Pratt Street. Her table was full of dozens of pieces she’d painted while working as an artist at Muse Paint Bar in West Hartford. She’s been painting for over 15 years, and been working for the last three as a full-time artist.
All of her work on display was acrylic, but she told me that her true love is oil painting because of the richness and depth of texturing and technique that oil painting offers. However, she said that oil painting can be “finnicky,” and demands much more space and resources than acrylic.
Anna’s quick paintings are genuinely beautiful pieces of work, demonstrating the level of talent that she’s gained over years of practice. (My own paint-and-sip pieces betray not only my inexperience, but the presence of alcohol.)
On the other side of Pratt Street was Sade Guess, a 24 year old who picked up painting in her sophomore year of high school. She developed her talent so quickly that she was able to earn a scholarship to the University of Hartford by the time she graduated.
The large piece on her table that brought me over is still untitled, as she’d just finished it a couple of days before the art walk. It was the blue hair against the lavender that I noticed first, but the eyes of the young lady in the portrait drew me in.
She said that the image started off very differently, with plans for a more involved background. However, she scrapped the idea because she felt that a busy background would take away from the portrait’s eyes.
For Sade, the eyes are the window to the soul, and the key to what makes her artwork so striking. She said that the eyes don’t have to be realistic, just captivating.
“I think as humans, we’re always talking face to face,” she said. “The eyes are the first thing that people look at. So I think in an artistic way, if you’re doing portraits, you want to make the eyes the best because that’s how we interact, usually with each other’s eyes.”
Sade is also a talented sketch artist as well, relying on her ability to recreate scenes with just a pencil and paper. She recounted the story of how she set up one of her favorite sketches, A Gen Z Birthday Party, by purchasing a bunch of party favors and then staging her friends to create the exact image she was looking for. She said it was fun to go from conceptualization to execution on such a project.
The Art Walk was a great way to interact with art in a different format- released from the walls of museums and exhibits, and on display with the artists themselves. I hope that the idea continues to grow in the future.
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Jamil goes to see some open mic comedy.
