SOUTHWEST ARTS FESTIVAL, INDIO 2016 – CELEBRATING 30 YEARS

Event to Feature Variety of Artists, Wide Range of Artwork, Objet Trouvé Found Art Festival

By Cindy Duffy

The Southwest Arts Festival, Indio 2016 will take place at the Empire Polo Club in Indio from Friday, January 29 through Sunday, January 31, 2016. Featuring traditional, contemporary, and abstract fine works of art by more than 250 acclaimed artists, categories include clay, drawing, glass, jewelry, metal, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, textile, and other arts. A ribbon cutting ceremony to mark the official opening of the 30^th annual Festival will be held at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, January 29.

Painters comprise a large number of artists exhibiting at the Festival, including two Los Angeles area artists with ties to the City’s ubiquitous film industry. The work of Los Angeles artist Stephen Schubert, a former actor and film lover whose abstracts on birch panels vibrate with great depth of color and surprising imagery, was prominently featured in the Steve Carrell film “Dinner for Schmucks.” David Palmer, a Pasadena-based artist who combines the vocabulary of Pop Art with an Italian Renaissance sensibility to create works reminiscent of aging frescoes and peeling billboards, has also created digital effects for more than a dozen feature films, including Spider-Man 3 and the first Harry Potter movie.

East of Los Angeles, Elaine Trei uses watercolors and oils to showcase her love of nature and color, creating intensely colorful, engaging and slightly impressionistic paintings at her studio in Big Bear Lake. The works of plein air artists and La Quinta residents Diane McClary and Silvio Silvestri have been influenced by their studies with other painters. McClary, who trained with the brilliant Russian impressionist Sergei Bongart, focuses on the color of the light that she sees in the scene to create landscapes, still life and figurative studies. Silvestri, the descendant of a long linage of artists, minored in art during college and began winning awards for his paintings in the early 1990s after studying with a number of prominent painters. Terry Sauve of

Sebastopol painted “for the joy of it” for most of her life until formal training at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco helped hone her craft of landscape painting by studying with some of the area’s best painters.

Returning from Utah is artist Sue Kroll, who primarily created acrylic paintings until she discovered her newest passion, Scratch Board Art, which offers a promise of detail that is difficult to achieve with paint. The jewelry art of Palm Desert resident Gunn Trigere has also undergone a transition over the years, from sterling silver and hand-wrought pieces that were made to be worn, to colorful glass “wall jewelry” big enough to hang on a wall or rest on a stand or an easel. California Central Coast artist Georganna Dean, whose stunning photograph “Agave Temple” was selected as the signature poster of the 2016 Festival, converted from a traditional “wet” darkroom to digital photography and printing in 2000.

Artist Richard Curtner of Cathedral City uses an X-Acto knife to cut colors, words and phrases from high quality magazines, which he carefully glues together and varnishes to create detailed collages. Former biologist Mark Doolittle works with hand tools at his studio in Joshua Tree to intricately carve gourds, exotic hardwoods and burls from around the world into unique designs, and life-long woodworker Walter Wogee builds beautiful ergonomic rockers – each a unique piece of functional art – and other furniture at his home in Sky Forest.

These artists and many more will be featured at the Southwest Arts Festival, named one of the Top 100 Events in North America for 2015. New this year is the popular Objet Trouvé Found Art Festival, representing an artistic style that uses everyday objects and ‘found’ materials to create stimulating visual displays. In addition to the art exhibition and sale, the Festival will also feature a variety of al fresco dining options and entertainment by talented local jazz musicians.

The three-day family friendly festival will be open from 10 AM – 5 PM daily, and admission is Seniors – $8, General – $10, Three-Day Pass – $12, and Children 14 & under – Free. Tickets may be purchased in advance by calling the Indio Visitors Bureau at 760-347-0676.

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