Features

May 21, 2010

Festival makes a cultural splash

By Mary Therese Biebel mbiebel@timesleader.com
Features Writer
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Inspiration can come from the rhymes of Dr. Seuss or the crazy inventions of Wile E. Coyote.

It can spring from a spouse slipping into her vintage nightgown or a friend opening his eyes really wide.

Just ask the creative folks whose work will be on display through Sunday at Wilkes-Barre’s 55th annual Fine Arts Fiesta on Public Square.

“I’m inspired by the weirdest things,” 17-year-old artist Hayley Smith of Plains Township said. “I can look at a house and see a face.”

Smith’s wood sculpture of a bacon/tomato/cheese sandwich and bowl of soup got its start at Wilkes-Barre Area Vocational-Technical School, where the artist studies carpentry and millwork.

“I was working on a computer desk and wanted to do a tongue-and-groove inlay. To do that, the diamond has to be in four pieces, little triangles that fit together. I thought, ‘This looks like a sandwich,’ and I just started from there,” said Smith, who attends Coughlin High School for academic subjects.

Because wood glue turns yellow when it dries, Smith used that substance to add a melted-cheese effect to her sculpture, which also includes white pine, black walnut, willow, oak, ash and poplar.

The teen, who is planning a career in medicine, hopes a local deli will buy her sculpture and put it on display. “That would be great,” she said.

Yet she’s happy just to have her work chosen for the Fine Arts Fiesta. “I’m so excited!” said Smith, who enjoys art class so much, she explained, “If they’d let me live there, I would.”

Perhaps many artists feel that way. But even if the necessity of earning a living takes them out of the studio to a day job, at least the Fiesta gives them a few days to immerse themselves in art.

That immersion is something Shawn Falchetti enjoys when he comes home from his engineering job. “It’s a different experience. You draw more from your emotions,” said Falchetti, 39, of Dallas, whose colored-pencil rendering of his wife, Kiersten, wearing a vintage nightgown won the title “best in show.”

Falchetti worked from a photograph that showed the gown’s “really rich green color, nearly iridescent, with light coming from a window” and imparted a “dreamy, half-sleepy” quality to the work.

The atmosphere was quite different when 14-year-old Deanna Dinelli of Nanticoke took a photo of her friend, Alan, who was “making some kind of funny face. He had his eyes open really wide.”

Thanks to the lighting, “one whole side of his face was whited out” in the picture, Dinelli said. That inspired her to paint just his one eye — peering through his spectacle lens — in oil on canvas.

“It was my first year in art class, and I wanted to try something new,” Dinelli said.

This year will be Dinelli’s first time to visit the Fine Arts Fiesta, she said. More experienced artists can tell her it’s a great opportunity to encounter a variety of media.

“When you go to a gallery, you might see all photographs or all paintings,” Falchetti said. “The Fiesta is a real melting pot, with terrific foods, too. … They’re all too tempting.”

Dave Reinders of Kingston enjoys the art and the music, too. “Whoever arranges for the music does a very good job,” he said.

His “brightly colored surreal work,” somewhat influenced by Dr. Seuss as well as “the classical surrealists of the ’20s and ’30s and Warner Bros. cartoons” has been chosen for display at the Fiesta.

“Needless to say, I’m gratified,” said Reinders, 59, who works in the supply end of food service at Wilkes University. “It’s a novel sensation. I haven’t had a lot of my work out in public.”

So did Reinders enjoy Dr. Seuss stories and Road Runner cartoons when he was growing up?

“Absolutely,” he said with a laugh. “I had an American childhood.”

Fans of the arts will find much to admire this year not only on Public Square but at various spots throughout the downtown because the Fiesta coincides with the monthly Third Friday Art Walk.

From 5 to 8 tonight, art will be on display at Marquis Art & Frame on South Main Street, the Widmann Gallery on the King’s College campus and the Downtown Arts building on North Franklin Street as well as other locations.

In the Arts Seen building along Public Square you’ll find the work of 55 artists on display as well as a collection of some 40 artfully designed bras, which are part of a “Bra-Zeal” fund-raiser for Susan G. Komen For the Cure, an organization that supports breast-cancer research.

Some of the bras are wearable; some not so much, organizer Paulette Pietrzykoski, 52, of Bear Creek explained.

“We have one — I’m calling it a sculpture — made of wire and raffia (paper ribbon) and dried flowers. It’s something to put on a shelf or use as a planter.”

Another is made of season tickets to Penguins games, trimmed with skate laces and sporting photos of the hockey players on the cups. You might not want to wear that one either.

Still, there are plenty of wearable ones, and, with help from bra-extenders, a handful of brave male models will wear them in a fashion show set for 7 tonight.

You can view all the bras today from noon to 7 p.m. in the Arts Seen building, where they will be available for sale or silent auction.

Proceeds will benefit Susan G. Komen For the Cure, through the efforts of Pietrzykoski’s four-woman team of walkers (They call themselves “Cape Creek Connection”) who are training for the 60-mile Susan G. Komen 3-Day fund-raiser in Philadelphia in October.

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