Spring Northampton Directors’ Picks
The 220 artists who are accepted to participate in the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton on Memorial Day Weekend are the “best-of-the-best” of America’s independent painters, sculptors, and craft makers from every corner of America. Each season, Paradise City introduces many exciting new artists who will exhibit their work in the Northampton show for the first time.
We are pleased to welcome a fresh crop of brand-new exhibitors to the show. From those artists making their Paradise City Northampton debuts, we have selected four as our Directors’ Picks. We introduce a new Hampshire artist whose paintings make you look at the world in a different way, a ceramist from Vermont via Mexico who celebrates her Mayan heritage, a Pennsylvania furniture maker who incorporates Shibui into his mid-century modern designs, and a sculptor from Maine who makes cold steel come alive. Please welcome these four and more than three dozen new artists to Paradise City Northampton this spring!
Working in a primarily abstract-impressionist style, New Hampshire-based Kristen Pobatschnig paints as if she sees the world through the eyes of an animal with entirely different rods and cones from humans. Her paintings of nature (hummingbirds, loons, forests), collections of light, and conceptions of outer space rely on pointillist and abstract techniques to show the world as someone – or something – else might see it. Colors are brighter, staccato and distinct from each other; motion is color, and color is motion.
Paradise City is excited to welcome this extraordinary new artist to Northampton. Pobatschnig’s work is in many public collections, including the Children’s Hospitals in Boston and Omaha, and it’s easy to imagine the joy her paintings provide. “I would like my work to serve as a break from reality as we know it,” she writes. “I invite the viewer to share a dance between time and space, to revel in wonder, and to enjoy the colors and textures of nature and light.” We may never know exactly what it’s like to see through the eyes of another, but there’s tremendous beauty in the attempt.
Every artist’s work provides and contains history, using techniques and materials of those that came before. But Mucuy Bolles, a polymath from Brattleboro, Vermont, has a more varied history than most. Working these days with clay, her history includes 26 years as a soloist and principal dancer with some of America’s most acclaimed dance companies and coach for the New York International Ballet Competition. Along with her mother and husband, she was also a James Beard semifinalist at their Brattleboro restaurant, Three Stones Mayan Mexican Cocina. We haven’t even gotten to her ceramics yet, which employs imagery, colors, and themes from her Mayan heritage.
“I strive to create a piece where movement, sound, and culture merge into a balanced whole, and ancient knowledge can be reborn through a new vision in the present,” says the Komchen, Mexico native. But even more than that, she “hopes to infuse my work with the mysterious playfulness of my Mayan ancestors.” Bolles’ sculptures are sturdy, timeless shapes, and often incorporate non-clay materials, like feathers and weaving. She incises mysterious hieroglyphics into the clay, lifting the veil between herself and the original scribes who wrote the same words in a different time and a different place. We welcome this new ceramist to Paradise City, and we can’t wait to hear her stories.
In a world of intentionally disposable furniture, constructed of unsustainably sourced fibers and formaldehyde-laced particle board and chintzy design, John Sterling wants you to think differently. “I believe your furniture should be a beautiful work of art that connects you to nature and to the future generations that will inherit your investment,” he says. Sterling sources most of his wood from sustainably managed forests in Pennsylvania, where he resides; his materials are milled by just a few family-run facilities who specialize in natural-edge milling.
Sterling’s designs all have an underpinning of long-lasting quality but can vary dramatically in aesthetic. He crafts exceedingly natural and unadorned Nakashima-inspired benches that follow the Japanese principal of Shibui, while his Draper Collection pays homage to the sleek and timeless lines of mid-century modern furniture of the 1950’s and 60’s. Every piece showcases the uniqueness of materials used to create it. Nearby woodlands provide black walnut, ash, and curly maple. Sterling encourages collaboration with each customer, enjoying the process of consultation, vision, and design that comes with the construction of his art. “Connect with the surrounding forests that grew the trees that I use. Trust me; you’ll end up with more than a beautiful piece of furniture,” he says. Take a seat in this new furniture maker’s booth at Paradise City!
The wild, swirling depths and patterns of new exhibitor Andrea Mulcahy’s metal sculptures present order and chaos as existing simultaneously, with one never triumphing over the other; they seem kinetic. As one might expect from such unique work, Mulcahy found herself embarking on a journey through media and materials to find the one that spoke to her. “Initially, my BFA in Textile Design drew me to weaving, printing and dying, and vessel form creation from objects found in nature,” says the Kennebunk, Maine artist. “I continued my search through the exploration of wood and clay and found they didn’t align with my need to manipulate the materials quickly.”
Instead, Mulcahy found herself drawn to steel. She shapes the metal by placing an end of the rod in a vise, bending it with her body strength. The rods are cut to length, the ends are smoothed on a grinding wheel, and the pieces are placed and welded with a MIG welder. The sculptures are finished when they’ve been sandblasted, then powder coated. Her recent sculptures appear to move, sometimes in tornado-like swirls, sometimes in elegant tangles, sometimes appearing like the carefree scribbling of a child with a pen and paper. Cold steel has never looked so alive.
