The Deland Fall Arts Festival

November 20,1997

The street is filled with hundreds of people, some carrying canvases splashed with bright primary colors, others with stained glass, woodcarvings of native Florida wildlife, muted pastel tones of nature-scapes, or glittering sculptures of metal, glass, and clay. Along with steam rising from hot grills, music from strumming blues-musicians wafts in from a side-street and joins the voices in the air-murmurs of appreciation and negotiation, the barks of lemonade-vendors, the excited shouts of children discovering the beauty of seeing and creating art.

Over 40,000 people will attend the fifth Deland Fall Festival of the Arts, in downtown on November 22nd and 23rd. More than 200 artists from all over the country - Florida, of course, plus Virginia, Ohio, and more-will display their wares and compete for more than $25,000 in prize money. Eleven categories of media will be displayed and judged, including oil and acrylics, watercolors, sculpture, jewelry, photography, graphics, glass, and woodcarving.

Besides the visual arts, musicians and other performing artists will entertain the crowds. While feasting your eyes, ears, and soul with the art represented, don't forget to feed your other appetites. Call it folk-art for the palate, festival food is special; besides sausages, onions, peppers, fajita-seasonings, and Caribbean marinades, a festival entree is flavored by its environment.

The Deland Fall Festival of the Arts has gotten good reviews from artists, critics, and the people who attend. While it doesn't get the same number of serious art shoppers as older, more established festivals in larger urban areas, it has attracted a growing number of fine artists; because they consider the event to be so well-organized and its commitment to fine art, many return and many recommend it to their friends on the "festival circuit".

Some artists have a head full of discipline; their creations are planned and thought out. They can tell you at any point exactly what technique they're using and how it works. Others create from the gut-they may have no clue what key they're playing in or why this color works with that, but they know what sounds right or looks good. A select few masters-like Thelonious Monk, Henri Balzac, and Shakespeare-so internalized their discipline that they seemingly act as a conduit to something beyond themselves, much as that Buddha might draw the power of creation in through its upraised palms.

Arthur Rayford, the featured artist at Deland's fall festival, and the creator of the poster artwork, is one such master. "I never went to school for this," he says, glancing at his easel. "Sometimes life just stops you, and every time you get stopped, you get a chance to do something different. My destiny drove me to this."

At first glance, his paintings seem similar to primitive folk-art-two-dimensional shapes, exaggerated, out-of-proportion anatomies, brilliant primary colors. After a few moments, however, other influences begin to emerge. A painting of dancers and musicians, Moonlight Limbo, shimmers with silvery light from thousands of tiny, Seurat-like dots of paint. Much like Duchamp, Rayford conjures the motion of sailboats in "Red Sails" by breaking up and replicating the geometric pattern of sails and hulls. In "Carnival of Dreams", the hopeless pipe-dreams of a casino-full of losers show up in grotesque caricature, and throughout many of his works, form and detail emerges from a Van Gogh-like crowd and clash of primary colors.

Rayford believes that an artist should create something people can relate to. Most of his own subjects are people and the things people do-dancing, playing music, fishing, or working in an orange grove-and the exuberance people feel for their lives. Economy of line-a curve on a conga-player's shirtsleeve, a toss of a hip, the stretch of a finger reaching over a keyboard for a black key-all suggest rhythm and movement. The artist rarely sells his paintings, preferring to sell prints instead. The paintings he has chosen to sell lately have fetched pretty high prices-as much as $30,000 for "Bumper Crop," a lively and colorful interpretation of work in an orange grove. However, he'd be willing to give the collection away to the right organization-one that would commit to keeping the collection intact and that exists primarily for the benefit of African-Americans.

No doubt the "trendiness" of so-called "ethnic art" has contributed to the prices of his paintings, but their true value is obvious in the works themselves. The paintings are more than self-expression-they are a part of Arthur Rayford. And, as he says, "you don't sell a piece of yourself to just anyone."

Morris Sullivan
Morris Sullivan has written "Notes from the Cultural Wastleland", a column of cultural criticism, for four years. It first appeared in Tabula Rasa, then Eleven, and now Impact, where he also writes regular feature stories. He has written and produced five plays. His "Weekender" columns run in the Thursday edition of "Go 4 It", the A&E section of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and he's contributed to The Orlando Weekly and other area publications. Sullivan holds an MBA and serves as financial officer at Theatre Downtown.