- October 14, 2024
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The 60th-annual Halifax Art Festival is bringing 236 artists to downtown Daytona Beach on Beach Street from Bay Street to Orange Avenue this Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 5 and 6.
Festival Chair Andrea Pair said a number of high quality artists return to the juried festival year after year. The festival, presented by the Guild of the Museum of Arts and Sciences, is organized and run entirely by volunteers to benefit the museum.
"The festival started in downtown Daytona, in the Beach Street area — the same place we are now — with folks who just kind of sowed their wares on the ground," Pair said. "It was a hit from the start, and so 60 years later, we're still having the art festival."
The guild also partners with the Downtown Development Authority to host the festival, which will also have live music, food vendors and a student art exhibit and competition. The winning art will be on display at MOAS after the Sunday award's ceremony.
George Guadiane, of Ormond Beach, is one of the artists that will be participating in this year's festival. An award-winning woodturner, he's been part of the festival for about eight years, and said it is a "well-presented and well-attended" event each year, an observation he gauged not only by seeing the crowds, but also by the artists in the booths around him.
"There are a lot of really talented artists that come and do this show from in and out of the area, and it makes me proud to be able to be among them," Guadiane said.
Guadiane decided he wanted to work with wood about 23 years ago, and as he explored this idea further, he attended a woodturning symposium. He turned a pen, and got it right on the first try, he recalled. He felt that was an indication of the path he should take.
He now makes hollow forms, vases, bowls, platters and the like, mostly out of exotic woods. How does he come by his material? Guadiane said he's a "hurricane shopper." Instead of cutting trees down, he goes out and looks for wood once the trees have already fallen, or finds wood through estate sales.
"One of my superpowers is the ability to see from experience what the wood is going to look like when I cut it up and then when I turn it," he said. "I'm not always right, but there are certain things that you can count on in most wood, in terms of how it reveals itself when you shape it."
What calls to him about woodturning as an art form is the idea that making a form on a piece of wood changes a person's view of the wood.
"In other words, if it was a flat board, you'd have one view of the wood," Guadiane said. "If you took the same piece of wood and turned it into a cylinder, all the different aspects of the contours and the grain patterns, etcetera, would be changed. So it's revealing the beauty of the wood in a different way."
Pair said one of her favorite parts of the festival is seeing the camaraderie of the team to put it together. The festival takes almost 100 volunteers to run, and it's a year-round affair. The festival is held in the first weekend in November every year, and by December, the guild is already making decisions regarding the next year's festival.
"I love it when the plan comes together," Pair said. "... It takes a lot of people to pull it off, and of course Sunday afternoon is always, 'Whew, we did it.'"
Pair is also excited about the student art display, which features art from Volusia County students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Thanks to The Wessell Foundation, the students will compete for a total of $4,000 in awards. All in the all, the festival prizes total $27,800.
"The students get really excited about winning some money for their artwork," Pair said.
And those students could very well be in the festival one day, she added.
"I've always been amazed at the quality of the student art," she said. "Of course, those are the artists of tomorrow, so it's important to us to encourage the young people in their artwork to continue and one day, they'll be the ones that will be going through the jury process and have a booth on Beach Street."
