Hundreds of avid art aficionados swarmed the Boston Arts Festival on September 9th and 10th. Many different types of art were celebrated and sold, including paintings, drawings, photography and jewelry. Members of the Boston Lyric Opera Company performed and a Children’s Pavilion with storytellers and sing-along hummed in the background.One of the artists participating in the festival was Jennifer Lewis. She has sold her work at the Boston Arts Festival for the past four years. Jennifer graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in illustration and now lives around the UMass Boston area in Midway Studios, an artist’s community in South Boston.Jennifer usually does small illustrations of animals. She especially enjoys drawing cats and pigs. I asked her what inspires her work and she said, “I’m inspired by fairy tales and dreams.”Her illustrations evoke a mythical, fantasy-type realm. One of the pieces at the sale was of Little Red Riding Hood sitting over a bed in which the Big Bad Wolf is laying down and he has an IV with a tube full of blood stuck into his arm.”I use mostly acrylics and collage,” Jennifer said when I asked her about her medium. There are pieces of German writing placed in some of the artwork. She told me that she buys old German books on E-Bay, and they are really cheap. She said that she likes the gothic script in those texts. One of the pieces with the German collage on it is a painting of a dog eating a piece of meat, and another dog is behind the dog eating another piece of meat. She said the German words that are placed in the art were part of a poem about a dog. For that particular piece, Jennifer said that she wanted the dog to be eating the other dog, but when she was painting it, it looks as if the dog was eating the other dog’s behind, so she put the piece of steak in between the dogs. It was amusing to sit and look at the people and their reaction to Jen’s artwork. Two little kids looked at the painting of the dogs and the meat and giggled, and their mother said, “Come on, don’t look at that, let’s go.”A brass ensemble, The Hot Tamales, marched by with instruments that were not polished, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Crowds swarmed from stall to stall admiring and sometimes buying the artwork. Children painted a mural that originally had an outline to color, but it got covered and a wild abstract painting emerged.The outdoor art sales take place in the fall months while the weather is temperate enough for people to be outside. The same day as the Boston Arts Festival, I saw that Arts on the Point in Charlestown was happening as I drove by on the bus. These sales kick off the open studios season, when the public can go to see where artists create their art.Jennifer Lewis will be participating in the Fort Point Open Studios on October 13, 14 and15. Over 200 artists of all different modes will be in their workplaces with their art for sale all around the Fort Point neighborhood near South Station.