While the Riverssance Festival of Fine Art has something for just about everybody - food, music, wine, and other entertainment - the artwork should take precedence. And although there are many worthy local artists on the roster of 105 showing at this year's event, the Reader is giving some attention to artists less familiar to a Quad Cities audience.

Lori Biwer-Stewart

Last year's best-in-show winner has only been working with her current medium for four years. Lori Biwer-Stewart of Osage, Iowa, said she just "kind of fell into" making her lino-cut prints - similar to woodblock printing but with a linoleum material instead.

She went to school for commercial art, has a full-time job in the field, and has toyed with oil painting. But the 35-year-old artist feels that she's finally found her place in the art-making world. "I've always been doing artwork," she said. "Sometimes it takes some time to find your niche."

Biwer-Stewart started with black-and-white prints but has begun adding color inks. She describes them as having "surrealistic, dreamlike subject matter. I like to include people and celestial objects."

Part of the appeal of printmaking, she said, is in the exactness required to achieve the right effect. "It's very expressive," she said. "Most of the prints are on a small scale. They just look very bold. You really have to choose what you cut out, what you leave."

But she's also expanding on that minimalist aesthetic. She said she's been incorporating mono-printing into her lino-cuts. "It gives you a different look," she said, "a little more of a painterly quality."

For examples of Biwer-Stewart's work, visit (http://biwer-stewart.artspan.com).

Liz and Rich Robertson

Clay artists Liz and Rich Robertson are old hands at art shows. They spend 32 weekends a year displaying their work at shows, and they've lived off their art for more than two decades. "We live modestly," said Liz, who lives in Dubuque.

Rich has been a potter since age 12 - he's now 54 - and Liz has been doing her clay work for the past 28 years, ever since she finished high school. Combined, they've spent more than 50 years as professional artists. "It's been a lifetime passion," she said. "It's what we do."

Rich, an award-winner at last year's Riverssance, works with a wheel and "throws very simple forms," Liz said. Lately, he's been doing works that he calls "nonpots" and "anti-platters," playing off traditional forms and using carvings that relate to the shape of the pieces.

Liz is a hand-builder of pottery, with plenty of bright colors and bright glazes. "My work is much more meticulous," she said. "It's kind of like clay quilting."

She added that traveling to shows together helps them survive with art as their sole income. "One year he'll do well, and one year I'll do better," she said.

Christina Collins

Potter Christina Collins studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, but when she graduated, she got a "real job" and abandoned the potter's wheel. She toiled for more than 15 years before pottery - and a mid-life crisis - called her back.

She was on the verge of turning 40, despised going to work, and thought: "Is this all there is? I hated it." In 1997, she took up her artwork again but kept her job. By 1999, she said, "I was really just crazed."

Her husband finally convinced her that they could survive primarily on his income. "It's not easy," she said, adding that although her family doesn't have as much money as it used to, she's much happier. "The outside job is just to earn money," she said. "The pottery fulfills something inside me. It's the feeling of personal accomplishment."

Collins, who is from Arnold, Missouri, said her work is fairly traditional thrown pottery, and she recognizes the Eastern influence on her pieces - "we all study what has been done before." But the Asian look of her work isn't intentional, she said, even though the carving she does is similar to that of Korean or Chinese pottery.

In addition to art shows, "I also attend a lot of science-fiction-oriented conventions," she said, because of the fantasy decorations on her pottery.

Last year was Collins' first at Riverssance, and even though she didn't sell much, she still wanted to return. "The feel of it was great," she said. Why let a little thing like money get in the way of satisfaction?

Daniel Edler

Daniel Edler of Cedarville, Illinois, is in his 39th year overall of blowing glass, and his 30th doing it full-time. Seemingly off the top of his head, he notes that his first show in the Quad Cities was in the mid-1960s at the Davenport Museum of Art (DMA) and that his work is in the permanent collections of the DMA and museums in Clinton and Muscatine. He's also a Riverssance veteran who likes the show for its location, its administration, its audience, its sales, the music, and the quality of the artwork.

"I was one of America's first studio glass artists," he said. Edler studied at the University of Iowa under Harry K. Littleton, who started the studio glass movement in the 1940s at the University of Wisconsin.

"I tend to work fairly large and quite thin," he said of his work. "I'm known for using a lot of color." Although the pieces are abstract, they're evocative of landscapes. You can see that in series such as Planetary Plain and Sea & Sunset, as well as their titles.

Edler works in a variety of styles and also creates glass sculptures, but he said he'd be bringing five or six styles with him to Riverssance.

For more information about Daniel Edler, visit (http://www.edlerstudio.com).

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