Art Shows I Love: Stockley Gardens Art Show
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I was planning on spending Sunday afternoon working on my new website for my Handmade Birthstone Jewelry series, when my husband reminded me that the Stockely Gardens Arts Festival was taking place this weekend. The was mostly because I like going to these event, but when you’re working from home, you sometimes have to remind yourself (or someone else has to remind you) to leave the house on occasion. 
The Stockley Gardens Arts Festival is a twice-yearly show that takes place in the Ghent Area of Norfolk, Virginia. The show held by the Hope House Foundation, a local non-profit that provides independent living support to adults with developmental disabilities, as a way to support local and regional artists. The Stockley Gardens Art Festival has been held at the historic Stockley Gardens Park for over 25 years with a Spring show held in May and a Fall show held in October. There’s usually about 150 artists in each show ranging from painters, photographers, glass artists, sculptors, and jewelers.
With music and food and visitors bringing family and friends, both the two and four legged kind, this is a pretty fun show to attend and/or participate in. Fortunately for this year’s spring show the weather was sunny and bright and not too terribly humid and hot. There was a pretty big crowd by the time I arrived on Sunday afternoon and looked like there was a lot of art buying too.
At every show, you either see a piece of art that wows you or meet an artist that wows you. Turns out that I encountered both this time.
The piece of work that made me smile was from artists Shandi Berls and Casey McConnell from Creative Works Pottery and Tile. As the name of the company suggests, they are a pair of ceramic artists from Wilmington, North Carolina that create a variety of ceramic artwork including jewelry, pottery, and wall pieces and frames. There were two pieces in particular that I was dying to get my hands on. One piece was a three dimensional wall piece built just like a dandelion gone to seed. Wires were inserted to a ceramic semi-spherical base and at each end of the wire were small colorful ceramic flowers. There was also a version with a full sphere that could be used as a chandelier. I so wished that I could have gotten a picture to display on the blog, but out of respect to the artists, I do not take pictures of individual work when I’m at a show. But, the artists do have a website and you can see examples of their work here. The picture shown here are wall pieces displayed on their website and you can visit their Etsy store here.
The artist that wowed me at Stockley Gardens was actually an artist from my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, photographer, Kenneth Smiegowski. He’s was one of the last booths I visited during the show, but it was the once that I had the most fun in. He takes lovely pictures of nature, landscapes, and still lifes of flowers, vegetables and fruit. There’s a lovely photograph of Chinese lanterns that I’m claiming pretty soon. But in addition to being a great photographer, he’s also a great character and conversationalist. I spent a good 20 minutes in his booth talking about Richmond, politics, and art. He had me laughing and smiling the whole time and was a great way to end out my tour of the show.
In addition to selling photography, he also does one-on-one photography lessons for those who wish individual instruction on how to improve their photography. If his teaching is as entertaining as his conversation, then the lesson should be well worth it. You can check out Kenneth’s website here.
