The Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival is of course rightly famous for the pancake, sausage, and syrup drenched meals in the Sugar Bush where festival goers can see Maple Syrup being made, take a horse-drawn sleigh ride in the bush, enjoy down-home country music and dancing, compete in friendly log sawing competitions and lots of Winter’s end fun – we have all the pictures here.
However, this year we decided to stay in Warkworth and take in all of the activities around town. And there was lots to do. The Town Center Building was filled with vendors offering art, woodcraft and tasty delectables:
And the Artshow at the old library had a wide range of works on display:
As can be seen from the photos there were some very compelling painting on view. What was surprising was much fewer crafts like sculpture, weaving, jewelry work, or pottery. Certainly if you went on the Trent Hills Gallery Hop this last year – the crafts were well represented.
Most Encouraging
The most encouraging art to be seen was at the Antiques Show at the Warkworth Grade Schools. Last year, this viewer had been delighted to see the innovative and exuberant Kids Art to be seen at the Warkworth Fall Fair. Now one of the influences for kids art expression certainly has been Artworth.ca organization which has a for the past 10 years provided a summer Week of Art for Trent Hills kids. Certainly that has been an influence on art in the community.
But the real revelation was found in the bowels of the Warkworth Public School – art on display everywhere:
Literally, th walls were alive with student Art. The above is only a small sampling. In sum, having kids think in terms of mapping their emotions visually onto a heart or identifying and empathizing their own and others feelings while using colours and designs to express those ideas – well this is a lot different from grade school 50 years ago where art took second seat to sports, math and science. It was the era of the Space Race. In sum, I suspected the caliber of artistic expression seen with the Kids Art at the Warkworth Fair went beyond a week of ArtWorth. And sure enough a complete school year of enhanced artistic expression appeared to be in evidence here.
So the Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival indeed had a sweet surprise this year.
