Bethesda Fine Arts Festival next Saturday

Get psyched for art, enjoyment, food & more at the yearly Bethesda Fine Arts Competition on Saturday, May well 14 (10am – 6pm) & Sunday, Could 15 (10am – 5pm)! Stroll Norfolk & Auburn Avenues to see 100+ artist booths, pay attention to excellent new music & delight in food, wine & beer for the ideal weekend in downtown Bethesda.

All free of charge and also lots of free parking!

Facts listed here.

You can see the Bethesda Wonderful Arts Festival 2022 artists here.

You know what is coming future – my awards for prime artists in the clearly show.  As a fantastic juror, I can use my skilled eye from the thumbnails and internet site visits to award the Campello awards.

For the painters I liked  Zhiyi Li (from Enfield, CT) in Booth #66, and Thomas Williams (from Chicago, IL) in Booth #78.  

All 3 printmakers in the clearly show are excellent — I’ve prepared a good deal about Joseph Craig English from Washington Grove, MD (Booth #84) – in this display John Pernell and Michael Nemnich are also really great.

For Mixed Media, my best choose was Sandra Sedmak Engel, whose sensual perform is a satisfaction both equally to the eye and the eros that outside displays usually try out to eradicate.

There are a whole lot of talented photographers in the present. See them all right here. James Richmond from Titusville, Florida (Booth #76) went to Cuba and has the mandatory images of aged 1950s automobiles in Havana, as I comprehend that the Cuban dictatorship will not allow for travelers (and photographers particularly) to depart from the jailed island except if evidence is offered at the airport that photos of the vintage autos have been taken.  

Pet peeve apart, Richmond has an fantastic eye for capturing the grace that is human form, all the way from Portuguese card players in Old Europe to attractive indigenous women in Panama, to Cuban farmers in the brutalized Castro Brothers’ Personnel Paradise.

Cuban farmer by James Richmond

It is a amazing photograph, capturing the essence of the Cuban guajiro, his historical Basque bloodlines however quite cleaning operating through his veins as evidenced by the telltale ear lobe, a vast smile for the American tourist on his slender lips, and a hand-rolled Habano in his mouth, the envy of each smoker millionaire about the earth.

In the classification of sculpture, Tanya Tyree caught my focus as her sculptures struggle among proficient effectiveness and a little bit of whimsy. What is very clear is a straight and exclusive vision being delivered by the (I suspect) very strong and skilled arms of this artist.

And the Campello decide for Greatest in Show?

It goes to painter Cassie Taggart from Rehoboth, DE in Booth #51.

Parachutes by Cassie Taggart

Even though anyone can quickly see that Taggart’s perform examine surrealism, what she has brilliantly completed is to produce a new 21st century edition of surrealism, where her proficient painting abilities marry it with fantasy, and the fantastical (which is diverse) as nicely as a wholesome dose of narrative storytelling.  

It is “otherworldly” artwork deeply anchored in knowledge which life hidden in our ancestral brain.  This is function which after you purchase it and cling it in your home, will dominate almost everything else which you have hung on people walls.

Go outdoors and see some artwork this weekend, talks to artists and artisans, try to eat some poor-for-you food items and hear to some outside songs.