Was Art in the Snow cool?

1/24/08
By Gordon Dritschilo Herald Staff “Art in the Snow” was held this past weekend by the Brandon Artists Guild.

“We’ve scheduled snow sculpture, but we haven’t got the snow,” organizer Judith Reilly said Tuesday. “We’ll be having that next time if Mother Nature co-operates.”

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“We have these statistics where only two out of every five visitors who come to Vermont on ski trips in the wintertime actually ski,” she said. “The other three are looking for something to do. We’d like to reach them.”

Guild president Jeff Stewart said this is the event’s fourth year.

“Not much happened the first two years,” he said. “Last year, Judy took over. She’s a ball of fire and she really makes things work. … The crowds were very good. A few people would put a notebook in their gallery and ask guests to sign it — most notebooks showed over 200 signatures for each weekend day.”

Maps to the locations will be available at the Artists Guild’s gallery in downtown Brandon, and studio-hoppers can collect signatures from 10 of the places they visit and enter a Sunday-afternoon raffle drawing for prints, note cards, jewelry and other items donated by local artists.

Drawings will be held at 4 p.m. each of the Sundays.

“We have 21 artists who have signed up to participate at some point over the three-weekend period,” Reilly said. “We’ll have over a dozen studios open each weekend.”

In addition to the studios, artists will offer various demonstrations at the Brandon Inn and the Briggs Carriage Bookstore.

Stewart said the participating artists include painters, potters, photographers and jewelers. Asked about offbeat or unusual work, he mentioned Dolores Furnari’s Country Owl Studio.

“It’s almost an antique style of art, stuff you see in the 19th century and not so much in the 21st, stenciling, painting on board,” he said. “There’s metallic paints that she uses. You would see art like this in antique shops but you wouldn’t see people doing it every day.”

Stewart also mentioned Reilly’s work, which she describes as “fabric art.”

“This woman draws with a sewing machine,” he said. “She paints with a sewing machine in fabric. It’s really cool. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

For more information, visit www.artinthesnow.com.

Contact Gordon Dritschilo at gordon.dritschilo@ rutlandherald.com.