Everybody loves a contest. And although it may not count as a spectator sport, the competition is red hot among Vero artists vying to be named designer of the Vero Beach Wine and Film Festival winners’ trophy.
At the very least, the contest has the festival’s steering committee and the Vero Beach Art Club on the edge of their seats.
It all started at the Art Club’s Art-tini Art Night at the Marriott Springhill Suites last November. The festival co-founders, Jerusha Stewart and Susan K. Horn, were admiring the works in the Art-tini exhibition when Stewart had a brainstorm. “I said, ‘Being that this is Vero Beach, how cool would it be to have the awards designed by a Vero Beach artist?’ ”
A woman of action, Stewart elbowed her way through the Art-tini crowd to vet the idea to the club’s president, Sue Dinenno.
Dinenno embraced the idea, and recommended having an Art Club members-only design contest for the Festival’s coveted centerpiece.
The club devised rules and an application form for the contest, and set a date for three-dimensional submissions of Feb. 15. That deadline was extended when it became apparent that a few more contestants needed to be coaxed into entering.
By the first week in March six entries – a respectable number – had been received. The next step was a review of the proposals by five jurors.
This writer was asked on behalf of the Art Club to be one of the jurors. My colleagues were members of the Wine and Film Festival executive committee. They included Stewart and Horn, Marie Healy and Gail Shepherd, whose dining room table served as the reviewing stand for this particular beauty pageant.
The jurors were told that the artists were given some basic guidelines in crafting their trophies. The trophies had to be between 10 inches and 18 inches high, and had to incorporate the festival’s logo or the letters “VBWFF.” The contest was open to works in any medium. Each artist had to agree, if selected, to produce five identical (or nearly so) copies of the award-winning design in time for the festival, which runs June 9-12.
In return, the winning design would reap glory for its creator, a ticket to the Wine and Film Festival awards ceremony, and a cash reimbursement for materials.
The six entries came from 10 artists. There were four who worked solo: Joan Earnhart, Sheryl Coppell-Sallow, Tillman Maxwell and Al Gustave. Six others teamed up in pairs: Bill Gimbel and Albert J. Norton; Sue Dinenno and Ron Miller; and Barbara Sharp and Sherry Wilson.
The gilded ornaments that are central to film festivals around the world are more than pretty dust catchers. Their designs represent not only the laurels of victory, but also the very spirit of the cities in which they are presented. The Venice Film Festival’s award bears a winged lion, representative of St. Mark, the city’s patron saint. The Golden Bear Award of Berlin honors that city’s heraldic animal. Even the Woodstock Film Festival award is suggestively apt: It resembles a peace sign atop a bicycle wrench.
The challenge then for the Vero Beach artists was to come up with a design that symbolizes the city while keeping the festival’s emphasis on wine and film front and center.
Art Club President Sue Dinenno says her trophy design, executed by Ron Miller, was inspired by ocean waves. The dark brown-stained wood sculpture links the cursive letters “V” and “B” in a graceful pas de deux.
“In my mind, you can’t look at our design and not think of Vero Beach. Whoever walks away with this award will remember where they got it,” she asserts.
Joan Earnhart submitted a wood assemblage sculpture, and in its center, a niche for a wineglass to nestle. Wood tiles from the game of Scrabble bearing the festival’s initials are glued on top of the box-shaped piece.
Her unique design, which uses found wood and other castoff objects, doesn’t look as if it could easily be reproduced as five nearly identical awards.
“They want uniformity, so I doubt they will select me,” Earnhart admits.
She adds, however, that her reason for entering the contest is flawless: “I think of anything like that as a personal challenge.”
Barbara Sharp and Sherry Wilson take equal credit for their design. It features a giant crystal wine glass on which is painted the Wine and Film Festival logo, as well as a film reel, the masks of comedy and tragedy, and a movie clapperboard.
The glass, which has a strip of 33mm film curled about its stem, rests on a movie film canister adorned with a cluster of plastic grapes, some corks and a corkscrew.
“We wanted to cover all the bases,” Sharp says.
Tillman Maxwell, a retired firefighter and paramedic-turned-woodworker, submitted a miniature replica of a movie camera on a tripod. The beautifully crafted model is made of cedar, figured walnut, Cuban mahogany and oak; the woods’ natural colors and patterns glow via a clear finishing coat.
Tillman, who says he usually makes “standard jewelry boxes and a little furniture,” confesses that the trophy project is “quite a departure from what I normally do.”
Sheryl Coppell-Sallow is certain that her design will bring a little bit of humor to the festival. “I think the people who receive it will enjoy displaying it,” she says.
Her design features a miscellany of corks, spirals of wire, glass beads, and flotsam found on the beach, piled atop one circular end of a large plastic spool. The spool, according to Coppell-Sallow, used to hold Christmas lights; it now represents a film reel. The whole is precariously balanced on an overturned wineglass, the stem of which sports a ring of letter beads with the festival’s initials.
Al Norton wanted to present “something simple – something you could hand over to someone.”
He sprayed-painted a champagne bottle metallic gold and set it on a walnut plinth. A paper collar around the bottle’s neck is decorated to suggest a circlet of movie film; the logo of the film festival is shown within the paper silhouette of a wine glass glued to the body of the bottle.
Norton’s partner Bill Gimbel will form the bottle’s collar and wineglass silhouette out of molded plastic – if the design gets the nod for production.
Wood sculptor Al Gustave submitted a turned poplar bottle shape that he stained a deep wine red. Mounted on a dark wood plinth, the bottle bears a gold-toned metal label on its front with the festival logo and room for the award winner’s name. Near the bottle’s foot, two pieces of “film,” made of the same gold-toned sheet metal, sprout like skinny wings – or perhaps a “V” for “Victory.” The neck of the bottle is finished with a fancy, hand-applied wrap of gold leaf.
The retired architect and interior designer says his design was made with continuity in mind. Assuming that the festival continues for many years, Gustave’s design could be “jobbed-out,” as he puts it, to someone else, should he not be able to personally see to its production.
“It’s like an Oscar,” he says. “People will be coming from all over the place – all over the world – for this festival. You don’t want something that looks amateurish.”
A ceremony to announce the winning trophy design will be held at the Marriott Springhill Suites April 17 from 1-3 p.m.
To RSVP or get further details, call 772-978-9292.