Deland Fall Festival of the Arts

Rockabilly music twanged in the humid air of downtown Deland – the Deland Fall Festival of the Arts was in full swing.

The typical paintings: oils, acrylics, watercolors were on display—yet the festival also presented a surprising variety of mediums, including glass and leatherwork, jewelry, ceramics, woodcarving, fiber-arts, metallurgy, and photography. Fine and folk arts were equally represented.

Patrick Dragon artwork

Among the food trucks, free booze, and street performers one artist in attendance, Patrick Dragon, presented fantasy plant sculptures. For the sculpture pictured he coated spikey Sweet Gum pods with clay. After he kiln-fired them, the ash of the Sweet Gum pod remained inside the sculpture’s eye-catching textured spheres.

Artist Chelsea Smith

Another artist, Chelsea Smith, presented etchings carved from copper plates and lined in ink. Inspired by the works of Alphonse Mucha and Albrecht Durer, Smith’s work included a detailed portrait of a stag with birds perched on his antlers, and the lines of his coat filled with movement.

No matter how little art education someone has, they can look at a painting or a sculpture, and feel something. At the Deland Fall Arts Festival artists, like Patrick Dragon and Chelsea Smith, provide new names for those feelings.