Video tour/interview at the Celebration of Fine Art (a 25th‑year, 40,000 sq ft tent event). Joe Polish interviews artist Joe Woodford about his ceramic techniques (press molds, horsehair firing, use of reeds and steel, glaze experimentation) and motivations; Susan, the event founder, describes the fair’s community, a memorial collaborative painting for late artist Debbie, and a fundraiser/raffle benefiting Hope Kids (a nonprofit serving families of children with life‑threatening illnesses).
Chapters
Celebration of Fine Art is what we call the place where art lovers and artists connect. This is our 25th year and we bring together some of the most brilliant minds in art from across the country. They come from all over. They set up working studios right here on our 40,000 square foot tent. And they are here every day creating their works of art. So you can come in and watch what they do, ask them why they do it, get the story behind it, and hopefully walk away with a piece of art that you love.
Hey, this is Joe Polish here with a guy I went to high school with who is a world class artist named Joe Woodford. So we're behind your art here. What's going on?
Welcome to my art, Joe.
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, many people don't know this about me, but I used to throw pottery. He's like a thousand times better, probably a million times better. But we were in high school together and I took three years of advanced ceramics. And you just stopped stuck with it. And by sticking with anything, this is the outcome of it. So you're going to see some of Joe's art and I'd love to have you explain not only like what it is, but how long does it take? I mean, what's your motivation behind it? Tell a couple of stories of your motivation for some of these things. I'd love to hear that.
Love to tell you. Well, as far as how long each piece takes, that's really difficult to dictate because you're looking at 30 years of failure and success that you come to that one piece.
Yeah.
So, you know, for example, this piece here, these wall hangings are first generation. So these are the first I've done. Other kind where I'm actually using steel. I'm using these reeds, as you can see, I put a lot of those in my pieces and I'm using, you know, the horsehair firing as I'm, as I'm going along. So this is a piece that has a really earthy, organic, rough, natural, contemporary feel. And I'm able to use this glaze and get it to go into all these different hues and colors. So I'm having a lot of fun with these. But they're all done into a kind of a press mold. And then the secret is being able to kind of see what the design is going to be as you're pressing it in. So if you look on the other side of that, it just looks like a big mess. But you know that the relief and all this that's coming out happens as you're throwing the clay into the mold. So that's what's kind of neat about it. It's like raku that you don't know what you're going to get until the thing's pulled out.
I had a turnaround in my business with my creative life and my business life. And I had this feeling of changing everything to be able to survive in the creative world. And I realized that the difference between a house and a home is you. It's got nothing to do with the building. In the center of that home is the couch. It's where the family comes together. We argue, we eat, we do everything. But it's just a piece of material, a piece of furniture. But I place it in every piece for that iconic feeling of you. It's your comforts and securities because that's how we feel. We come home, we sit back, but with that, I pose all these social questions. And so I love New York because I can actually. I feel like it's a social zoo, but I can use all the billboards to tell stories. So as we look up here, if you go down a road and it doesn't have any hurdles, it's not worth going down. It's because overcoming the challenges in life is what makes life meaningful. And to live in the present, but still focusing on the future. When we have so many decisions in our life, we shouldn't be misled or turned around by, say, the main products trying to sell us on, you know, think differently by buying our number one product or misled by bad morality of society or the people who we believe know better than us when really there's a hidden agenda. So we shouldn't be forced into those choices because what we have is our time. We only have our time. So what we want to give is morality to the next generation because they're going to be making our decisions. And I use the balloon as that because it rises above everything values, whatever it may be a stronger than anything else. So in our decision making, we want to bring family and friends and our heritage. Yeah, that is a kangaroo. Into our life and our decisions. Because each time you make a decision, it's going to change the rest of your life. So I treat it like a game of chess because we got the black and the white. And if we want to play by our own music, sometimes we have to wear a mask in society to fit in. Because just like at school, sometimes you don't get picked for that team because you're not the in person. So. But when we do get that chance to make those decisions. We want to make sure that we have the morality and value that we were given to as a kid. So these are the decision cycles in our life. Bringing all this in while this is happening all around us.
That is awesome. So that would be a perfect example of telling a story of what it means. Looking at that, I would have no idea had you not explained that what this represented. This is Joe and I'm here with Susan, the founder of Celebration of Fine Art, and explain this painting behind us here.
Yeah, I got a little story. One of the things that makes the Celebration of Fine Art so amazing is the community that fosters here and how the artists grow to love and support each other. And same with our clients. The relationships that part of the marketing we try to do really well here. So we had an artist who had been in our show about 10 years. And when she started off, she was real timid, small paintings, not bold, not expressive. But over the years, she grew from her experience here and she got more and more bold and started doing oversized paintings. And she had two passions. One is animals. And she would travel around the world from the money she made from being at the Celebration of Fine Art. She went to Antarctica, she went to Africa, she went to Ketchum. She went all over to film with her camera, capture her subjects, matters with her camera. Sadly, in September this past year, she passed away after a short battle with lung cancer. And she lived a beautiful life and a full life and embraced it and went very peacefully. When we went to her memorial, her husband Brian, who would let Debbie come down, he would stay home in Idaho. Every year she would come down here. She had several canvases that she had just started blocked in, done the sketch with the elements of the bison. So Brian said to us, I want you to take this painting down and let any of the artists that want to help finish this painting do it. And you can do whatever you want with it. It's yours. You can keep it, you can sell it, you can donate it. So we collectively decided we wanted to contribute the funds from this to Hope Kids. Hope Kids is a local in Arizona and Minnesota. It's an organization that provides events and activities and outings for families with children with life threatening illness. And so we had a special Hope Kids Day, and it was for children with solid tumors. And a little background on me is I'm an osteosarcoma survivor. And about eight years ago, I first met a young man named Owen when he was first diagnosed with osteosarcoma. And he came to the show with his mom and had the opportunity to paint. And so Owen and I have been friends ever since. And now he's 15, and he's doing really well, and he's now mentoring the younger kids that are recently diagnosed with. So this was sort of a community event for similar people.
That's awesome.
The Hope kids, each one that came that day got to paint on this canvas.
Wow.
So this is Celebration started by Debbie, completed by Celebration Fine Artists and the Hope Kids.
So this is not. Is not for sale. It's actually going to be.
How you.
How someone.
Well, we had a raffle drawing. Anybody who had the intent to purchase, they put their name in a box, and we priced it at 3,500. And the winner of that was drawn two days ago. And this painting will go live with this wonderful collector of ours. His name is King Hartman.
Oh, wow.
Been coming to the show for decades, like, since the early years, and is a huge fan of Debbie's, and he was the name pulled out of that box.
That's great. You know, and my father died of lung cancer also, so my mother died of cancer, too. So I like the fact that you're. It's not only great celebration of her life, but it's a great community effort to bring everyone together and to also do something for Hope Kids, which is great.
We called it the Circle of Hope, and this is Debbie's bison. But the whole concept was Circle of Hope.
Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to share that story with you because I think it's pretty cool. And you can find more about this wonderful business and organization, celebrateart.com thank you.
