VERO BEACH — The sight is faintly familiar – elves in their workshop? At the back of Tiger Lily Gallery and Studios, four artists toiled away last week, artists under pressure to produce.
“It’s great to have a deadline,” says Tiger Lily artist Sharon Sexton, half groaning as she laughed.
While other shops pick up the phone or get online to re-stock in the Christmas rush, artists are not just selling, they are creating product as well. Potter Maria Sparsis and her husband Randy Hagood, co-owners of the tea shop Tea and Chi, that hosted the local clay artists’ Mad Potter’s Tea Party on Tuesday, with artists bringing their handmade teapots hoping to sell them for Christmas.
Hagood says the American Express campaign to support local businesses two Saturdays ago did bring in customers.
“I intend to participate again next year,” he says.
His wife Maria takes it a step further. She and fellow potters at Flametree Clay Gallery want customers to buy locally produced artwork.
Anticipating a big crowd at Friday’s December gallery stroll, Sexton, a painter and ceramist, says the push for Christmas is gratifying, even if it means putting aside temporarily the work she most wants to do.
“It’s wonderful especially at Christmas to concentrate on making things that are still hand-painted and beautiful but at prices people can afford,” says Sexton.
Dozens of the artists in Vero’s art district are cranking out works that are functional – not just teapots, but platters, mugs, Christmas ornaments, as well as easy-to-place prints and paintings.
“I’ve been trying to think of things that don’t take as much time,” says Sexton. She has come up with a line of painted glazed plates in brilliant hues.
At $95, they can fill a nook on a plate stand, serve hors d’oeuvres, or hang on a wall, without having to appeal to the specific artistic tastes of the gift-getter, the way a large painting might.
Flametree Clay Gallery has strings of ornaments from its dozen or so artists. Priced at under $40, they are bits of whimsy and wit that can blend in with a family collection. Many other works are under $100.
At the other end of the price spectrum, at Artists Guild Gallery, the ornaments made by guild member artists are being sold to benefit not the artists, but Our Father’s Table, a Gifford soup kitchen that is a favorite cause of members Annette Gekle. Handmade ornaments are selling for $10 to $25.
In addition, this month’s featured artist at the Guild Gallery is Maija Baynes, a Lake Wales landscape and still life painter, specializes in miniature paintings. Her small-scale works start at $175.
If Friday’s Art Stroll in downtown Vero leaves a few names still on the gift list, Fort Pierce’s downtown offers a fallback: the Art Walk on the second Wednesday of every month at Art Mundo. From 5 to 8 p.m., the bank building–turned-gallery complex opens its studios with wine and hors d’oeuvres and offerings from many of its 40 studio artists, including several from Vero.
