By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
For Bryant and Sharon Tubbs, it started with a 1965 Mustang. He bought it, and started fixing it up.
That, his wife said, involved his buying “more and more and more equipment,” which they still had when they sold the car.
So he started making lawn sculptures with reclaimed metal.
Then she asked him: “Why don’t you do real art?”
It was a challenge.
Now he bought metal in sheets, and used different finishes, and using plasma cutters.
That transition wasn’t easy, he said, looking back on it, but satisfying.
Now the Ypsilanti, Michigan, husband and wife team has the satisfaction of a Best in Show award from the Black Swamp Arts Festival.
Other award winners are:
- Ellen Smith, Little Bare Furniture, Best 3D
- Chris Plummer, print, Best 2D
- Aaron Bivins, watercolor, second place
- Derrick Riley, third place
- Deborah Vivas, jewelry, Janet Alford, painting, and Xiao Xia Zhang Minich, embroidered images.
Sharon Tubbs said that they have wanted to attend the festival for many years, but always missed the deadline. This year she made sure they got their application in.
“We’ve heard great things about this show,” she said. “We’ve heard great things about the people, about the location, heard good things about the people who put on the show, and they really have been good to us so far.”
The works were selected in the spring for inclusion in the Juried Show by a three-person panel: painter Paul Verdell, a 2018 graduate of BGSU, Allie Hoag, head of the glass program at BGSU, and painter Jessica Vito, an adjunct instructor at BGSU. They returned Friday evening to decide on the awards.
“They really stopped me in my tracks,” Verdell said of Tubbs’ works. “I enjoyed the shape of the sculptures and how monumental they were.”
Speaking of Smith’s furniture, Hoag said she was drawn into “the immersive space” of her booth. She has hanging elements and wall elements. “She really thinks about the function.”
Hoag is impressed by the “sweat equity” in Smith’s work. She laminates the wood and carves it to create her forms.
Smith has received honors at the festival before, both in 2014 and 2018.
The woodworker credits the festival with launching her business Little Bare Furniture.
In 2013 she and her husband had just moved to town. She had a one-year-old and was pregnant, and didn’t know how she’d use her training in art.
They attended the festival, and she realized: “I can have a business.”
She majored in sculpture at Marshall University in West Virginia. While there she took an elective in furniture. “This is what I was meant to do,” she said.
Her work has included designing the seven parklets in downtown BG.
“I love seeing people using them durig the festival,” she said.
[RELATED: Ellen Smith of Little Bare turns furniture into art]
Printmaker Plummer is also a previous award winner, including Best of Show in 2013 and 2015.
His work has evolved over time. Now he mostly works with color – it’s what he likes and also it’s more salable. He moved to the country about eight years ago, and that shifted his focus to more landscapes.
And now, for his smaller prints, he uses Styrofoam, a material he used before with students.
“I was just drawn to the colors and forms,” Hoag said of the Kentucky artist’s prints. “He has great fluidity of the process,” not as boxy as usual with woodcuts. His images, she said, “are very loose and emotive.”
Verdell said he was overwhelmed by the colors when he entered the booth of fellow painter Aaron Bivins.
The Toledo painter is a long-time participant in the show, first in the Wood County Invitational and then the Juried Show. He also a few years back demonstrated his technique in the Artist at Work section.
“I like his color mixing and the way his colors are derived,” Vito said. The gestures he uses to make his mark on the page are “very illustrative and distinct. He has a lot of attention to the work.”
Verdell noted the range of work including landscape, figure and still life.
All are drawn close to home. “Most people like to see the local scenes,” Bivins said. “My style is very impressionistic.” That provides just enough detail that allows the viewer “to finish the painting themselves.”
Bivins has been painting for 45 years. It’s never been his full-time work, he said. He’s taught school and for 30 years worked for UPS. He retired 12 years ago, and now babysits his grandchildren.
Bivins still tries to paint every day, pointing to a series of three small paintings of bananas, all done in one day recently.
Even at the festival, he always has his easel up, painting while he talks to visitors to his booth.
Third place winner, Derrick Riley said, the Black Swamp Festival has been a good show for him. His prints, featuring fanciful, sometimes monstrous animals, are also available on t-shirts. They are popular with young people, he said. “Any university city, we’re going to do better in.”
That holds true for Bowling Green. Friday sales paid already covered his expenses, and there were two more days to go, as well as the prize money, he said.
The awards are: Best of Show $1,500; Best 2D and 3D, $1,000 each; second place $800; third place $500; and Honorable Mention (3), $200 each.
