Bayou art festival draws people from all walks of life
Featured artist a Brazilian painter with graphic style
When Brazilian artist Tony Paraná moved to Houston from Albuquerque, N.M., in 2007, he quickly set a goal for himself: He wanted to be the featured artist at the one of the Bayou City Art Festivals.
The self-trained artist knew it would be the perfect outlet for his oil paintings and mixed media work — no matter how much rejection he faced.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is perfect; I’m going to see myself in this one day,” said Paraná. “I started applying, but I didn’t get accepted into the festival until 2015.”
Paraná celebrated reaching his goal at this year’s Bayou City Art Festival Downtown with his colorful artwork displayed on the walls of his booth at the front of Hermann Square and plastered on promotions, banners and T-shirts throughout the event.
He was chosen as this year’s featured artist in part for his colorful, graphic style, which added diversity and an international flair to the festival.
The festival attracted nearly 18,000 people to the booths of the 300 artists who traveled across the country to display their works, which ranged from abstract paintings to digital prints, collages and hulking metal statues, said Bridgette Anderson, the festival’s executive direc-
tor.
Alongside artists, the festival featured a multitude of food trucks, musical performances and a children’s area featuring stations by several area nonprofits. Anderson said one of the goals is to return the profits from the festival to those nonprofits.
Inspired by his youth in Bahia, Brazil, many of Paraná’s pieces vibrantly depict life in the favelas of Rio — children playing with homemade toys and people practicing Capoeira, a Brazilian fighting and dancing style that he teaches at studios in the Galleria area and Katy.
He even created a new painting for the festival titled “Liberdade,” or “Freedom,” which depicts a group of children gathered in a Capoeira sparring match with the Houston skyline and Brazilian favelas merged together as the backdrop.
“Capoeira is in me and my art,” Paraná said. “Even if it doesn’t show in the imagery, it’s in the emotion.”
Many of the pieces that South Carolina artist Carl Crawford featured over the weekend festival also centered around music and dance, depicting dark and moody soul and R&B singers and clubs through a unique style that he calls collage illusion.
“I wanted to do something to stand out, so I started cutting colors out of magazines and arranging them by hue and tone to create the illusion of oil painting,” said Crawford, lifting a large frame to reveal the thousands of scraps of print that make up just one of his pieces.
As the festival wound up for its final afternoon, artist Dale Rogers positioned his metal sculpture, Swirl Bird, in the grass near the fountain in Hermann Square. He meticulously panned his phone to capture the 7-foot-tall iron statue, capturing the Wells Fargo Plaza in the background.
Rogers said he made the more than 30-hour journey to the festival from his home in Haverhill, Mass., because it’s one of the best organized in the country and the opportunity to present his art at such a large event was too exciting to pass up.
“I’m from way out in the country, so how often am I going to get to put up a piece in the big city?”