Skip to main content

Mainsail Art Festival

If you remember last year's Mainsail Art Festival at the Vinoy, I became a patron of the arts.  I bought three paintings from Maria Pascuta and vowed I wouldn't do such a foolish and expensive thing again.   Twelve months later I returned to the scene of the crime and dang if I didn't do it again.



It was a deceptively warm day.  In fact there was an elderly woman who had collapsed at a tree and was visibly ill with the heat.  Her daughter was rather and rightly frantic looking for help.  Thankfully it came and I assume she was OK.   The above pic isn't much, it just shows the layout and some folks who attended.  


Mainsail is an invitational show with many repeat artists bringing their work for sale.


This guy brought his bird out.  Why, I don't know.  Just like the guy at the gas station who had his bird perched on his shoulder while gassing up, why do these people bring their birds?   Attention?  Hmmm.  Questions, questions.  


It is a great show with talented artists.  Besides the paintings below, I also got some ceramic vase-like thing that the guy embeds leaves in before getting it fired.  When it is done the imprint of the leaves is in the piece.  Very nice.  



Kate Carney, artist of this work posed with her painting.  It is an acrylic piece, rather impressionistic of wild flowers on a black background.  It appealed to me. 


Here you can see her use of Bravura (bold and highly visible) strokes to get the paint onto the canvas.  Her formal education was completed at the University of London and Queen's College and presently teaches and paints in a large studio in a haunted house in Eustice, Florida.



Now this piece was very cool.  Artist Peggy Furlin paints watercolors onto canvas.  She is the only person I have heard does this.  It is time consuming and the works are colorful and different.  As multiple layers of watercolor are applied,  they are worked and reworked, scratched, scraped and splattered.  Then they are sealed with a spray varnish and this is the result.  Pretty neat, huh?



Mainsail 2013 is over and it gives my bank account a chance to heal, perchance to dream of next year's.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philippe Park and The Tocobaga Indian Mound

About ten miles or so north of Bedlam is a place called Safety Harbor.  Its the place that has the 300-500 year old oak that the city tried to kill I featured a couple weeks ago on BFE .  They have a pretty nice park that has some interesting history, too.  Count  Philippe landed here and introduced the pineapple and cigar making to the Tampa Bay area. Today, however, I want to mention something else about this area, besides the really nice scenery.  Phillipe Park was also the home of the Tocobaga Indians.  The Tocobaga occupied the Tampa Bay area from around 600 A.D. to the 1600's.   This is a fairly common view of old stately moss-laden oaks down here.   This shot was taken atop the only Tocobaga Indian mound in the area.  This exact spot is home not only to the Tocobaga until they died out, but then to Count Phillipi who settled the area after the Tocobaga died out.   The place is full of oak and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flashback Friday

Class, Or Lack Thereof The Dwight Vice gravestone in Oquawka, Illinois. I bring this old chestnut out every so often just to remind me that class is classless.  Dwight Vice was killed in his home near Oquawka in 2001.  It was one of those things that can generate crime:  two guys thought Dwight had a lot of money stashed at home because of his pot-selling sideline to supplement his fishing job.   Not really one of those big drug deals gone-bad things.  Marijuana was, according to the trial, about the only stuff Dwight sold.   But these two guys barge into the house and killed Dwight and attempted to kill his 11 year old kid, Darryl, before they took off with what money they could find.   His son, now 23, was stabbed in the back and left for dead.  He survived and is wheelchair bound and has undergone several surgeries to repair his wounds.  He will be paralyzed for life.   None of this is pleasant.  Reading the f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Warsaw Brewery

Roadtrip!  That word is like a dog whistle to me.  The Wombie's played coy with me a couple days but finally we loaded into the Chevy (sadly, no Jeep) and headed south to Warsaw, Illinois.  They tried to keep it a secret as to what was down there but loose lips  sink ships but it was good anyway. Warsaw is a small town around Hamilton and to get there you get to travel the Great River Road along the Mississippi. You get to go through Nauvoo, too and get to see the magnificent Mormon Temple overlooking the river. Its a great couple hours of scenery and juicy things to see and then, before you know it, you are trying to find an old closed brewery that has been transformed into a restaurant and bar. There are many overlooks and scenic cut outs along the Great River Road.   There is even a little history if you are into it.  This marker notes the place where a vanished town, Montebello, used to exist.  It was also the...
Post a Comment
Read more