Wall Street Journal features fellow balloon artist

My friend, Jonathan Fudge, of Tampa, Florida was featured in the Wall Street Journal. He did a great job representing the balloon twister industry. Thanks and congratulations to balloon guy Mr. Fudge.

Several other great balloon people were featured as well. It is a great article all around.

The article by Timothy W. Martin is below.

TAMPA, Fla. -- Jonathan Fudge studied his subject closely, furrowing his brow and taking it in from different perspectives. Then he dipped into his palette: a bag containing 2,000 balloons in 19 colors.

For the next 10 minutes at a birthday party here, he blew up more than 15 balloons, each with a slightly different amount of air, and twisted them in pairs and triplets.

"Getting one step wrong could be the difference between a masterpiece and an unrecognizable mass of balloon bubbles," says Mr. Fudge, a gregarious 23-year-old.

Finally, he handed the birthday boy the finished product -- a portrait of Luigi, a character from the Super Mario Bros. videogame, complete with twisted brown mustache, green body and white gloves. The boy smiled and asked him to autograph it.

Balloon entertainers are looking to inflate their image. Gone are the rudimentary swords and fishing poles of the past. Today's best and brightest construct 25-foot-tall sculptures of soccer players, life-size Harley-Davidson motorcycles and 3-D balloon versions of European art.

Mr. Fudge and others aren't shy about voicing their aspirations to be taken seriously. "What I do is art," says Mr. Fudge. "Just like there was a Renaissance for art in Europe, there's a renaissance in balloons today."

They are also making a good living, setting the stage for price wars and clashes over whether the endeavor is more culture or commerce.

For decades, face painters, jugglers and clowns twisted balloons as part of their acts. But their work wasn't much more sophisticated than stick drawings.

'La Vida Latex'

Over the past decade, many such entertainers stopped clowning around and specialized in balloons. In 1999, the first balloon-twisting convention, called T-Jam, was held in Austin, Texas. The profession has grown since. Up-and-comers like Mr. Fudge can learn the fundamentals from instructional books, Web sites and DVDs such as Don Caldwell's "Livin' La Vida Latex."

Big-name balloon artists such as Mr. Caldwell -- aka Buster Balloon -- of Garden Grove, Calif., and Larry Moss of Rochester, N.Y., earn as much as $2,500 an hour, compared with about $35 an hour for a typical performer.

Known for his large-scale projects, Mr. Moss has designed a 10-room, life-size haunted house and a 3-D balloon version of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," which he recently entered in an art show in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Florida artist Jonathan Fudge wants a little R.E.S.P.E.C.T for his craft of twisting balloons into colorful creations. According to WSJ reporter Tim Martin, Mr. Fudge hopes to hone his skills into greatness.

Balloon twisting is now the most-requested form of event entertainment on GigMasters.com, an online entertainment-booking service, surpassing DJs, cover bands, acoustic-guitar players and Elvis impersonators. Just four years ago, balloon twisters ranked No. 24, says co-founder Kevin Kinyon.

Entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Alexander of Land O' Lakes, Fla., help explain why. Through
his company, Balloon Distractions Inc., Mr. Alexander hires and trains balloon twisters from Seattle to Miami, booking them for four-hour gigs at restaurants.

In August, Balloon Distractions booked 1,118 gigs, more than doubling the prior August's 500. Mr. Alexander expects revenue this year to total $400,000 and to grow 75% in 2010.
"I took a corporate approach to balloons," says Mr. Alexander, who concedes he's not popular in the inner circles of ballooning. "Creative balloon artists make bad entrepreneurs."

David Brenion of Ojai, Calif., says he's more interested in perfecting his art than inflating his bank account. Twice a month, he makes a five-hour round trip to "jam" with other twisters. Mr. Brenion, 27, says his creativity "starts to stagnate" at home. But at the jams, "you all feed off each other, and it's this crazy, colorful feedback loop," he says. "It's awesome."

Todd Neufeld, 35, of Brooklyn, N.Y., worked as a small-business lawyer and planned to become a patent attorney before embracing the life of a ballooner.

"If I had become a patent attorney, I would sit in a cubicle for the rest of my life, poring over the fine print in the notes of inventors," says Mr. Neufeld. Still, he used his legal knowledge to pen a book, "Sign Here! Contracts for Balloon Entertainers."

Mr. Neufeld doesn't just work for kids. At a holiday party for a university's clinical-psychology program, he says, he rendered a double-helix model of DNA.

As balloon artists gain in popularity, full-time ballooners are getting into price wars with part-timers. Twister Dave Bigelow of Fullerton, Calif., says he was put on an unofficial "hated twisters list" because he charges $50 an hour, which the part-timer says is below the market price for his area.

Ballooning veteran Billy Damon of Orlando, Fla., a full-timer, says Balloon Distractions has wooed away some of his restaurant clients by charging $10 an hour -- about one-fifth of his going rate. Nearly all of the money goes to Balloon Distractions. The performers work mainly for tips.

"Every restaurant I go into now has a balloon person," says Mr. Damon, 50, who calls the "We Twist for Tips" buttons worn by Balloon Distractions' entertainers "tacky." Mr. Alexander says the buttons were switched months ago to read: "Tips R Cool!"

Mr. Fudge started twisting balloons in elementary school. By high school, he was landing gigs at restaurants and birthday parties. He dabbled in juggling and whip cracking before settling on balloons. He likes that he can send his work home with the audience.

"They take part of me," he says. "My life, my time, my effort, my energy is going to them."
Mr. Fudge estimates that he spends about $2,000 a year on videos, seminars and magazine subscriptions to develop his skills. Today, he earns about $150 per appearance and about $50,000 a year.

Artistic Heroes

Mr. Fudge, who says his artistic heroes are Picasso and Rembrandt, is finding that beauty remains in the eye of the beholder. At a Mexican restaurant one recent night, he made a purple butterfly, a brown puppy and a green alligator.

Then a little boy asked him to make R2-D2, the three-wheeled droid from "Star Wars." Mr. Fudge spiraled and corkscrewed three long white balloons into a latex robot, roughly the size of a box of cereal. As finishing touches, he drew a blue line and some black boxes. A young girl at the table grimaced.

"That doesn't look like a real R2-D2," she told Mr. Fudge, who quickly changed the subject.

Moments later, when Mr. Fudge was working the next table, the young girl flung the R2-D2 into the air. It landed in a plate of sour cream.

Jason Vaughn,

Balloon Artist, Dallas / Fort Worth

(972) 505-2241

HigherHopeBalloons@Gmail.com