For woodturner John Mascoll of Safety Harbor, winning the Best of Show award at the Mount Dora Arts Festival was déjà vu.
He had won top honors and the $5,000 prize at the festival in 2015. Sunday morning, he learned he’d won it again.
“This caught me off-guard,” he said. “My Caribbean background usually keeps me calm, but I was grinning like a Cheshire cat.”
John Mascoll, Winner
Coming off a rainy Saturday, when hard-core buyers and collectors were among the few who braved the elements, artists welcomed crowds Sunday that did not let chilly temperatures and windy conditions keep them away.
The Barbados-born Mascoll was again collecting congratulations at his space on Fourth Avenue.
“Last year, Reuters picked up a story that I won,” he said. “I got a call from Barbados from someone who said they had seen that I had won in a festival ‘somewhere named Mount Dora.’ ”
Mascoll tells the story of how he learned to work in wood from his father, Egbert Mascoll, a shipwright, or boat builder. His light-as-a-feather wood vessels are often closed with a lid topped with a delicate finial.
“The winning piece is ‘Spalted Tamarind,’ made from a wood from India,” he said.
Retired for three years from an engineering career, Mascoll, 64, creates his prize-winning pieces in his garage workshop.
“They tell me when you get all artistic, the place should not be called a workshop,” he said. “But my garage is my studio.”
The judges, Mark Price, professor at the University of Central Florida, Ann Larsen, director of the Leepa-Ratner Museum of Art and Richard Colvin, executive director of the Lake Eustis Museum of Art, also chose painter Charles Gatewood of Phenix City, Ala., for two-dimensional work, and jeweler Julie Jerman-Melka of Calumet, Mich., in three-dimensional work, for the Judges Choice awards, worth $1,500 each.
Two artists from Lake won Awards of Excellence, worth $500: painter Kate Carney of Eustis for two-dimensional, and sculptor Jim Casey of Clermont for three dimensional.
Other two dimensional Awards of Excellence went to Jeff Eckert of Tampa, Tom Styczynski of Riverview, Bruce Holwerda of Hoover, Ala., Robert Goodlett of Dunellon, Ning Lee of Livingston, N.J., Nicola Barsaleau of La Crosse, Russell Grace of Elkton, Wis., Bruce Reinfeld of Philadelphia, and Cali Hobgood of Urbana, Ill.
Other winners of Awards of Excellence, in the three-dimensional category, were John Whipple and Patrician Karnes, both of Winter Park, Jake Ollinger of Fairhope, Ala., Bill Slade of Jacksonville, Jack Hill of DeLand, Frank Strunk of St. Petersburg, Timothy Lockwood of Fillmore, Utah, Darla Ellickson of Decorah, Iowa and Linda Bobinger of Kingsland, Ga.
Layl McDill of Minneapolis, Minn. won the $250 Wendy Alderman Award for most creative use of the medium.