Winter Park to host 45th Annual Autumn Arts Festival

It’s October again — meaning the city of Winter Park’s Autumn Arts Festival has returned for another weekend of fine art and surprises. 

The annual event, now in its 45th year, showcases art pieces, including photography, sculptures, mixed-media creations, paintings, ceramics and more from artists across all of the Sunshine state.

More than 180 artists and more than 200,000 members of the public are estimated to attend this year’s showcase, which will be presented by Winter Park’s Axiom Fine Art Consulting group. The curated group of artists — Winter Park Chamber of Commerce President Betsy Gardner Eckbert said only half of the applicants were accepted — will compete to win awards and cash prizes throughout the event.

After their breakout performance at last year’s show, the Maitland Middle jazz band will be returning to kick off the event Saturday morning. 

 Douglas Bringle, Clay Sculptor

Growing up, Douglas Bringle wanted to be an archaeologist. But when that didn’t pan out, he decided to make artifacts of his own.

Bringle, a Winter Park resident, works at the Crealdé School of Art as an art instructor. He specializes in making clay and ceramic sculptures that range from animals and humans to jars and teapots.

“You get lost in the creative process and you focus on that,” Bringle said. “Between you and the clay, there’s a special relationship. It takes you out of your daily life, and at the end of the day, you’ve created something unique.”

The son of an Air Force navigator, Bringle was born on a small volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean and quickly grew a love of both history and mythology. He grew fascinated with the various cultures of pre-Columbian civilizations and eventually reflected that fascination in his work. 

Many of his sculptures are influenced by Mayan culture as well as groups that used to reside in the Andes mountains. One of his proudest creations is an intricately designed chess set featuring Incan civilization that took more than a year to create.

He also aims to create lesser-known — but equally important — animals such as aardvarks, fish and platypuses. 

His approach to his work is meticulous, as well. Reuben typically sketches his designs before shaping them with clay, covering them in a glaze and delivering them into the 2,400-degree gas kiln. The entire process can take several weeks to finish.

“It’s wonderful to unload the kiln,” he said. “That fire does unpredictable things. Even though you have an idea of what it could do, you never know exactly what it’s going to do. … Sometimes, it’s just breathtakingly cool to first see (the sculptures).”

Orit Reuben, Impressionist Landscape Painter

Orit Reuben likes reality just fine — she just thinks paintings can use a little bit of the fantastic. 

Reuben, an impressionist landscape pastel artist, grew up in Israel in an artistic family. She ended up taking after her grandfather, also an impressionist landscape painter.

“(Impressionism) just seems magical to me,” Reuben said. “It’s like an in-between of fantasy and reality; it’s prettier than reality. I think that’s what people want in a painting. They don’t want a photograph — they want a little bit of fancy. Illusion makes reality better.”

She specializes in plein-air paintings, which are started on location and often completed in the studio, and is a member of plein-air group The Florida Painters. Although she has lived in Baldwin Park for years — not to mention her first-place win at the 2018 Winter Park Quick Draw — this will be Reuben’s first time showing off her wares at the Autumn Art Festival. She’s bringing a few Winter Park-and-Maitland paintings to the show. 

She recently discovered one such painting, a look at the cypress trees on Lake Maitland, half-finished in her garage. The finished product has a focus on the peach-and-red hues of the waterline with a few other colors thrown in. 

Finally, Reuben has been pivoting to painting interiors. She has found inspiration for what to paint in her morning coffee routine — one of her newer pieces is of Barnie’s Coffee Kitchen on Park Avenue. 

“Interiors is all about how the light reflects, and how the windows reflect on the floors,” Reuben said. “It’s about how light takes things. … When I would walk in every morning, I’d take a look at the scene and think that I had to paint it.”

Each painting, which often is 12-by-9 inches or 16-by-12 inches, takes only a few hours to finish, but Reuben then adds additional layers and tweaks the final product over the course of several days. She is excited to bring her finished products to Central Park for all of Winter Park to see. 

“There’s always something I want to fix, something little,” she said. “But then it’s a feeling of accomplishment. It’s like you’ve created another baby.”

IF YOU GO

45th Annual Autumn Arts Festival

WHEN: Oct. 13 and 14

WHERE: Winter Park Central Park, 150 W. Morse Blvd., Winter Park

WEBSITE: winterpark.org/autumn-art-festival