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Manayunk Arts Festival fills the street with art and art appreciators

Shelley Weber was mesmerized. "It's just dreamy," she said, peeling off her sunglasses to get a better look at the crystalline-blue canvas titled "Underwater Diver." Artist Jeannie Maddox's depiction of a woman surfacing gracefully through a cloud of exhaled bubbles simply stopped Weber, of Bryn Mawr, and her interior designer, Judy Rohtbart, in their tracks.

Bonnie Eastwood of Hudson, Fla., who crafts art from straw and gourds, works on one of her pieces in her booth at the 21st annual Manayunk Arts Festival. The festival, featuring the work of 275 artists, ends Sunday evening.
Bonnie Eastwood of Hudson, Fla., who crafts art from straw and gourds, works on one of her pieces in her booth at the 21st annual Manayunk Arts Festival. The festival, featuring the work of 275 artists, ends Sunday evening.Read moreRON TARVER / Staff Photographer

Shelley Weber was mesmerized.

"It's just dreamy," she said, peeling off her sunglasses to get a better look at the crystalline-blue canvas titled "Underwater Diver." Artist Jeannie Maddox's depiction of a woman surfacing gracefully through a cloud of exhaled bubbles simply stopped Weber, of Bryn Mawr, and her interior designer, Judy Rohtbart, in their tracks.

It was perfect, they concluded, for Weber's beach house in Cape May.

Amid the 275 painters, sculptors, jewelers, photographers, and fiber artists whose works are on display through 6 p.m. Sunday at the Manayunk Arts Festival, the work of Maddox, of Dothan, Ala., tended to draw special appreciation.

"I'm blown away," said Michele Roque, of Cherry Hill, a watercolorist and art collector. "The imagery, the subject matter, the technique. I'm a painter, so I really appreciate what she has done."

Now in its 21st year, the annual two-day festival spreads along a three-quarter-mile stretch of Main Street. Organizers bill it as the region's largest outdoor juried art show. The 275 exhibitors were chosen from among 480 applicants this year in a tougher-than-usual competition, said Jane Lipton, executive director of Manayunk Development Corp., which organizes the event. In a typical year, she said, about 375 applicants from more than 33 states vie for 275 coveted positions.

Maddox, and her husband, Sam, who builds the frames on which his wife's paintings are stretched, have been on the art show circuit for 35 years. Over the July 4th weekend they will be in East Hampton, N.Y. The weekend after that they will be at Penn State. This is their first year in Manayunk, which in ideal weather can draw as many as 300,000 people over two days.

"We read some good things about it," said Sam Maddox of the couple's decision to come this year. "You never know who you're going to meet. And you've got to be where the people are."

While Maddox's original oils sell for as much as $24,000 to top corporate executives, the festival also includes works selling for under $50, including "vegan artisan soaps," and humorous, small painted boxes by "Boxboy" Paul Bierman, of Alexandria, Va. He calls them "demented decoupage." Each box is inscribed with a funny phrase - some too bawdy to be printed here.

Another newcomer to the show - but not to the region - is Ellen Harbison of Seattle. She used the occasion to visit with her sister Dana Harbison, an acupuncturist, and their mother, Ruth Harbison.

Raised in Abington, Ellen Harbison has lived for 20 years on the West Coast, where she is a soft-glass artist and professor at Pratt Fine Arts Center. Her creations, made from vividly swirled Murano glass bars cut and shaped by an oxygen-and-propane torch, adorn a series of silver bottle openers, salad servers, cheese knives, and other tableware.

"It's fun," she said of the craft. "I get to play with fire and melt glass."

Tom Bazis is a more frequent exhibitor at the Manayunk Festival. In the four or five years that he has attended, his ornately hand-carved rocking chairs made of aged and exotic woods always are crowd-pleasers. Selling for $6,200 to $7,800, they are constructed using mortise-and-dovetail joinery - and not a single screw or nail.

A native of Philadelphia, Bazis graduated from West Catholic High School and attended Temple University on a football scholarship. While serving in the Peace Corps in Venezuela, he learned wood carving from a well-known Ecuadoran sculptor there.

Since then, Bazis has created more than 120 one-of-a-kind rocking chairs that he thinks of as "interactive kinetic sculptures."

As the show came to a close Saturday, he had sold one chair - a modest number, but a nice return.

"It's always high risk and high gain when you are doing the upper-end products," he said.

After putting so many intimate hours into his creations, does he ever have trouble parting with them, even for a big payday?

"I've always looked at myself as a conduit," he said. "I listen to the wood and use tools to extend its life as it extends mine."