Previews: Paradise City Arts Festival

Paradise City Arts Festival, Northampton, MA

May 7, 8, 9, 2022

paradisecityarts.com

   

Cowan

Paradise City Arts Festival has been presenting award-winning fairs and functual art for over 25 years. The artists are vetted by a special committee who select many genres of art from throughout the U.S. and some from other countries. Approximately 30 individuals are our neighbors from Western MA. Check out their booths when at the Fair. The following are just a few of the locals.

As a painter and illustrator, Doug Cowan has done artwork for The New York Times Book  Review, Wind-Up Records, Workstyle Magazine, The Independent, The Deal Magazine, Kevin Eastman's Heavy Metal Magazine, Lucasfilm, and The Topps Card Company, among others. He paints landscapes on location (plein air) and from memory in his studio.

 

Peeso

Bruce Peeso concentrates his focus on the horizon in his elongated acrylic paintings. Most are 48” wide and just 8” high. The extreme proportions are designed to emphasize the vastness of the landscapes, and the simplicity of content is intended to convey a peaceful serenity that invites the viewer to enter. With his particular attention to the sun's rays at different times of the day, each painting yields a quiet sense of time and place.

Justice

Haviland Justice says, “At Made:Cozy we design and make furniture and smaller household objects that are built to last and have a timeless yet playful aesthetic.” Justice graduated from Hampshire College, where she took advantage of the college’s innovative Center for Design (C4D, in short). Her final project was an interactive furniture exhibit where she built and staged a line of furniture inspired by childhood toys, and she hasn’t looked back. Like many Paradise City artists, Justice aims to blur the lines between sculpture and fine home furnishings. Her goal is to fill your home with cozy, lighthearted, humanizing, and modern heirlooms.

Haines

Bill Haines says, “I love turning green wood. There is an immediacy to it, a closeness, a sense of direct and instant involvement. I can find a piece of the tree I want to work with and bring it into the shop and start to work on it - now. It will take 6 months to finish the urn, but I can start now. That start requires a focus and a quickness of pace, once the wood is on the lathe it needs to be shaped and hollowed out before it dries too much - if it dries too much it will crack. Then patience. The rough urn needs to be dried slowly, thoroughly, over a period of months, before it can be returned to the lathe to be finished.” He learned his craft from Walter Goodridge, who demonstrated wood turning for many years at Paradise City.

To peruse a collection of previous Paradise City Arts Festival articles, follow this link.