Last time I saw the fairgrounds, two glass-blowers were shaping a pumpkin on a metal rod and pulling the molten glass like taffy to give it a stem. A fiber artist brought panels as large as oil paintings in silken thread, and my parents found a table of wooden books — boxes carved like grimoires with ingenious hidden openings.
We were at the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton on a sunny fall day, like this one. The first long weekend in October brings out artists and artisans along with ripe squashes — all through the hills.
The sun’s coming out after a week of rain this weekend to warm up the annual Harvest Festival on Saturday and Sunday at Berkshire Botanical Garden. They’ve hosted this party for more than 80 years, and this year they’ll gather live music, jazz and ukulele (or maybe both together), more than 100 artisans — ceramics, alpaca wool, herbs — and a countywide farmers market, pony and hay rides, tag and plant sales … and workshops on cheese-making, cider and mead, beekeeping or heirloom apples.
Scarecrows survey the ground at Berkshire Botanical Garden.
Berkshire Botanical Garden plans family activities, pony and hayrides and music for the annual Harvest Festival.
Mark Hewitt's ceramic urn, almost man-high, glows in the ferns at Berkshire Botanical Garden on a fall day.
Berkshire Botanical Garden displays fall colors.
A bench invites a quiet moment at Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge.
Early fall flowers catch the late sun at Berkshire Botanical Garden.
A mobile scarecrow visits at Berkshire Botanical Garden for the annual Harvest Festival.
The inside look at hands at work continues on Saturday, from the Stationery Factory in Dalton to back roads in the southern Berkshires, as the Guild of Berkshire Artists holds its last Open Studio tour of the year, with 20 artists in nine studios, in abstracts and oils, photography, pen-and-ink …
Not far away, In Lenox, photographers come close to the natural world as Art in the Barn opens an exhibit of Mass Audubon’s annual contest winners on Saturday. (Here are the 2017 winners, to give a feel for kind of images people capture. An iridescent snail curls over a petal, and white egrets fly over sunlit meadow grass.)
East over the ridge, the Paradise City Arts Festival is coming to the Three Country Fairgrounds in Northampton for all three days of the long weekend, and I’ll be there on Monday. In full disclosure, I have family there this year — my mother’s cousin-in-law, Daniel Weinstock, is a sculptor in wood and ceramics. My mother’s cousin, Lisa Parr, restores carousel horses and is a beautiful artist in her own right.
Vicente Garcia demonstrates on the potter's wheel at Paradise City Arts Festival. A ceramist and college professor, Garcia is also a sculptor of large-scale metal structures. He will share the secrets of his studio every day at the Festival. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
'Peaches' by Doane Perry, a photograph of sunwarm fruit, appears at a group show by the Guild of Berkshire Artists.
'Abandonned' by Carol Kelly, a roaboat drifting in watercolor, appears at a group show by the Guild of Berkshire Artists.
Dwight Baird lives on the border between Canada and New York State, but his heart resides in the tropics. Baird’s current series of paintings shows the people of Cuba. These sun-drenched works move through the backstreets of Havana, with old men playing dominos and rolling cigars, women swaying to a Latin beat in mysterious doorways and vintage cars rolling slowly down the road. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
A handthrown ceramic dish ripples with creamy glaze in a group show by the Guild of Berkshire Artists.
And while I’m waiting, I may wander west toward the Taconics. Hancock Shaker Village is planning a weekend of food and words and woodworking. On Sunday, playwright Jesse Waldinger will hold a staged reading of stories from local history: Elizabeth Freeman, who won her freedom in 1781, and a free black man who turns to the law in original ways to bring his daughter home from the Shakers.
On Saturday, I can come into the kitchen. Boston Globe correspondents and Hungry Traveler bloggers Patricia Harrison and David Lyon will be there, with Shaker cooking and a cookie competition in the afternoon, and local farms and gardens will provide a worlds’ people dinner.
But here’s what caught my eye first. On Saturday night, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets, will read his work aloud — sly and warm and unexpectedly rhythmic.
He tells the story of a people who
“… pored over the mud
of mangold- and potato-pits
or flicked through kale plants from Comber
as bibliomancers of old …”
A bibliomancer tells the future from a book, and these people tell it in a garden of cold-hardy plants. Harvest and making and a fleck of magic root together and pick up speed, like clay on a wheel.
Catherine Cantara is a ceramist who makes functional stoneware, raku-fired and pit-fired (smoke) pottery. She says, "My work is influenced by the beautiful landscape that surrounds my studio. The rugged seacoast, the woods behind my house, the sky and earth all play a part in the shapes and colors I use in my pieces.” She incorporates horsehair and metallic lustre glazes into many of her very distinctive raku-fired pieces. Crow Bowl is raku-fired pottery with horsehair. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival
Philip Roberts, an artist at Paradise City Arts Festival, creates complex wall pieces made of multiple layers of cut wood, made from various plywoods with subtle differences in the grain. He stains the layers in different colors to bring out the design's depth.
Fall brings color at Hancock Shaker Village.
Pumpkins and gourds at Wild Oats Co-op Market in Williamstown.
Pumpkins and gourds gleam in the sun at Wild Oats Co-op Market in Williamstown.
