Bill Cramer grew up in Riverside, CA exploring the deserts and hills near his home. Family summer camping trips and learning the sport of rock climbing further cemented his love of the outdoors. Despite his attempt to become a professional fulltime college student, Bill finally graduated from Cal State University Long Beach with an BFA degree in drawing and painting plus a minor in outdoor studies.

A move to central Arizona opened his eyes to the possibilities of landscape painting, and today he divides his time between his family, his art, and his outdoor pursuits. His beautiful and sensitive “High Sedona” plein air oil on canvas (20″ X 20″) is the featured art for the 2010 Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts.

Painter Jarrod Eastman, winner of the Painting category at the Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts, has been chosen as the Featured Artist for the Fall 2009 Festival. His “surrealist” images are potent and colorful, perfect for helping us market the Festival. Now from Bozeman, Montana, Jarrod grew up in Arizona. His early influences were skateboard, rock band, and pop culture art.

He’s self-taught, and his work has been shaped and reshaped over the last 15 years in the business by the subcultures ranging from skateboarding, punk, jazz, hip-hop, and the spoken word. His most creative moments are infused with motion, music, and color. He brings a fresh, provocative look to the Festival!

Check out his images online at www.jrodart.com

Counts’ affection for art blossomed into a love affair when he was introduced to the art of glassblowing in 1978. He was young, full of energy and still searching for his educational direction in college. One day Counts watched a glassblower work and this experience changed his life forever.

He studied with Dick Marquis and Lino Taliapiatra at Haystack School of Crafts summer workshop in between 1990 and 1991. Counts became a production glassblower in various California glass studios from 1984 to 1985.

One of Counts’ beautif vases from his “Spiro Bowl” series is the Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts inspiration for all marketing and promotional materials and can be viewed in the DTC office Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Paul Counts’ booth will be located on the intersection of 5th Street and Mill Avenue in the Featured Artist exhibit space

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1962, Carson began to experiment with the tools he still uses today at a very young age. Each year of maturity brought more motivation to mine his past, sometime very distant past, for clues to his future. His palette includes electronics, illustration, the camera, and mechanical systems, all woven together to interact with the spirit of the human being.

Carson personally executes every step of his process, which includes design, engineering, protyping, metal cutting, pounding, and finishing as well as glass and cement casting. He has an assistant that helps with sanding as well as shipping.

Every one of Carson’s designs starts in a rough sketch on a napkin or the backside of a discarded piece of paper. He believes a good sketch begets a good piece, and over time when he is looking to do something new, he looks to his piles of sketches and executes from the most intriguing. From there he works digitally, sizing the parts, figuring the mechanics, reflecting the rotations and clearances. When the design is done he breaks this digital sketch up into pieces and prints them at full scale. From the stage he drills and cuts the parts and begins to assemble the final piece, including the glass balls, the hubs and the transitions.

It is not easy to weave functionality with form. Not many of the things he dreams are realized, and not every realization matches the rough concept in style and grace. Embarking on each new project destroys his fantasy of its ideal potential; replacing it with a reality that can be frighteningly vivid or painfully dull. There is no book he refers to. Andrew Carson creates original pieces today, based on the cruder ones he made yesterday.

Bringing more to his art than talent and training, Michael Ezzell taps into secrets of the past to sculpt art that is ahead of his time. Armed with a rare knowledge of ceramic history, Michael Ezzell has produced works that span from whimsical to Indian earthenware to oriental sculptures. He began painting at twelve, but this Laguna Beach native didn’t turn his passion for art into a career until he began working in clay during rehabilitation from a knee injury incurred while playing for the Orange Coast College football team. That’s when he transitioned from athlete to artist.

His fascination with clay began before his injury, with a trip to England where he saw a potter throw on his wheel. During his rehabilitation Ezzell learned how to throw on a wheel and eventually studied every aspect of ceramic creation, culture, and history. His studies included traveling to the remote island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea to discover the secrets of creating the finest porcelain and stoneware at the Yacht Pottery Studio, which introduced him to the old fashioned way of creating ceramics with kick-wheels and wood burning kilns. After Bornholm, Ezzell studied at Exeter in England, then traveled through Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East studying indigenous pottery. He’s traveled to every continent except Antarctica searching for local ceramicist secrets forgotten by modern teachers.

Now, after nearly 40 years as an artist, Ezzell draws from all of the different processes that he had studied to create his own style of ceramic sculpture using a metal patina, which gives his thrown pieces individual characteristics, including steel, bronze, and copper metal finishes, with anacid wash to age them.
Ezzell’s Apocalyptic Fish is the 2008 Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts inspiration for all marketing and promotional materials. We include his Redemption Fish in our permanent Featured Artist Gallery in the Mill Avenue District offices. It is on display Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Self-taught artist. Born in Hiroshima as a daughter of a Japanese master craftsman, Rin can’t remember a time when she was not surrounded by art. She began backpacking early on and visited or lived in Micronesia, South Asia, USA, Central and South America, Europe, Middle East. Now she lives in San Diego, California.

“Her oils focus on the human form dealing with the human condition. Penetrating eyes and vivid colors highlight the symbolism in her work. Her style is not modeled on any particular artist or genre. She gets inspiration from life experiences and feelings. Originality and creativity are the two fundamental essence of her art.

“My work begins with creating the totally chaos on canvas. I let any themes or accidents happen and go. As I continue this process, osmotically imagery begins to emerge. My painting is a result of many layers of thoughts and feelings.
For me, painting process is like ‘tuning’ to voices to be heard. I take inspiration from everyday life, things, relationships, beings around me. I observe it and pass it on in my form.”
Rin has created poster designs for theater troupes, card designs for Charities (M.S.F., Rashid Paediatric Therapy Center, Dubai Eco etc.), magazine illustrations, mural paintings. Her paintings have been published and bought by numerous collectors in UK, Australia, Switzerland, Japan, France, Germany, Canada, the UAE and the US.
Website:www.rincolabucci.com

Marna Schindler of San Diego, California, is the Featured Artist for the 2007 Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts. Marna’s art is at once both a journey of introspection and a bold, determined declaration. Her work isn’t about time, place or theme. It is a projected mood, a playful bout of doing…the act of attempting to create something beautiful, true to its source, yet slightly askew—irreverent almost in its slightly sentimental depiction.

Settling on concrete forms that delight and inspire, Marna meditates on these and exploits them for their intrinsic harmonies in colors, lines, and shapes. She works from an instinctive place within, taking pleasure in the process as she creates. Drawing upon memories of places traveled and moments of note, she gathers her muse. She also pays homage to various 20th century masters, and uses their guidance as a departure in uncovering her own style and flourish as she develops as an artist.

In viewing her finished work, a certain honesty is revealed in the visible brush strokes, vivid color, and improvised line. Her work is a record of its own process, and a clue to its sometimes very quick execution. It is this directness that makes the work authentic. It’s this whimsical, yet honest, juxtaposition for which we chose “Funky Chicken.”

Marna Schindler works primarily in oils and acrylics. She lives in San Diego, California.

Chelsea Stone of Prescott is the Featured Artist for the 2006 Fall Tempe Festival of the Arts. Her cast glass pendant was chosen for its unique technique and imaginative combination of materials. It’s being used to represent the Festival in promotion, marketing, and signage.

A native Arizonian, Chelsea Stone has been making jewelry for twelve years. Her creative palate includes silver, gold, copper, cast glass, handmade glass beads, colorful gemstones, and brightly colored enamels. Her one-of-a-kind creations have been featured in the books 1000 Rings, and 1000 Glass Beads, both Lark Books publications.

Chelsea is a full-time studio artist who sells her jewelry in more than 50 galleries throughout the United States. She teaches classes in her studio on glass bead techniques, and also teaches metalsmithing at Yavapai College in Prescott and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.Chelsea received her BFA from Northern Arizona University and her MFA in metalsmithing from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

The original pendant, from which this year’s imagery has been taken, has been installed in the Mill Avenue District’s gallery, located in the Downtown Tempe Community, Inc. offices at 310 South Mill, Suite A-201, Tempe, AZ. The gallery exhibits several years of the most recent featured artists’ works from the fall and spring festivals. Gallery hours: M-F 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Bobbie Stearn was the Featured Artist for the 2006 Spring Tempe Festival of the Arts. Bobbie’s arts career is multi-faceted. She has been a ballet dancer, a well-known interior designer and is now a visual artist and published writer. She started painting in 1964 in Orange County, California, studying with local artists and teachers. Now retired and living in Sedona, with her husband Harvey, Bobbie devotes her time to writing and painting. Her style is impressionistic with a vibrant pallet. She works in oils, watercolors, and pastels. Her subjects are the figure both nude and draped, still life compositions and Sedona’s magnificent landscapes, from which we chose her oil painting “Reflections at Red Rock Crossing.”