Post and her husband, both artists, founded the Paradise City Arts Festival in 1995.
Linda Post, co-founder of the Paradise City Arts Festival.
Linda Post gained perspective from what it was like to travel around the country selling her artwork at craft fairs and artisan shows. She saw the good and bad of those venues.
Post, along with her husband and business partner, Geoffrey, took that knowledge and went from traveling artists to artisan promoters with the establishment of the Paradise City Arts Festival, now in its 18th year, and one of the most coveted craftsmen and artists shows of its kind in the country.
The couple put a hold on selling their “wearable art”—handbags, luggage and clothing—on the road and organized the festival that started in Northampton in 1995 and has grown from 160 exhibitors to 260, and to twice a year. The festival has also expanded to two shows in Marlborough with 175 artists.
“We had reached an age where we felt as though it was time for us to make a change. We had seen how other shows worked from doing them,” she said.
“There were a lot of areas where we felt things could change. A lot of artists talk about that kind of thing but most of them don’t their money where their mouths are.”
For Post, running the contemporary craft and fine art show isn’t just selecting artists and picking show dates. Rather, it’s the “personal touch” that she and her husband bring to the festival that keeps it fresh and successful.
“A lot of people who promote events are very much behind the scenes. We’re always out there, very hands on and we interact with the artists all the time,” she said.
She will spend time with the artists offering suggestions on their presentations, discuss their work with them and provide “mini-seminars” on ways to have a successful festival.
“We think it is incredibly important for us to be accessible. We have so many years of experience at both ends of this business,” Post said. “We feel as though we should be tapped for our knowledge and share it.”
Planning and running the festival in two locations is full-time work for the couple, and also includes Post writing most of the content for the twice-a-year glossy magazine that promotes the festival and gets sent out to 80,000 households. She also handles the publicity and marketing.
“Every time you put on a show it’s almost like you’re planning a wedding for 250 brides and grooms and all of their families and all of the seating arrangements involved,” Post said. “You have to be able to visualize walking down an aisle and have everything so interesting and different from each other that nobody can sleepwalk through it.”
When not working on the festival, Post creates her own artwork, some of which was inspired by her growing up in Fall River and spending a lot of time at Horseneck Beach in Westport.
“Water has always been important to my artwork. There is a peacefulness to the water and there’s a sense of immersion that I often try and get across in my paintings, a feeling of psychological immersion,” she said.
Many of the figures that appear in her paintings are based on actual people but she changes them when she paints to create “relationships that probably don’t exist in real life.”
“Sometimes I put people together in my paintings who have never been together in real life or I put them in places they have never been,” she said. “What I’m doing is creating a narrative, creating a story and a situation and delineating it in paint.”
These days, Post continues to work on a series of oil paintings that explore the nature of adolescents and the “sense of being in a body that’s changing and a little uncomfortable and not knowing your place in the world.”
About eight years ago, the couple had an art studio featuring high ceilings and bright light built at their Northampton home.
“I try to have my paintings describe what it feels like to be somewhere between childhood and adulthood and trying to find your way,” said Post, who also enjoys gardening, traveling, playing golf and reading.
“Adolescence is a difficult time. You don’t even know yourself from one day to the next. That’s what I’m trying to portray in my paintings.”
Now with the economy improving, Post sees the potential for expanding the Paradise City Arts Festival.
“We’re always looking at ways to offer new opportunities for artists,” she said.
For a list of upcoming shows at the Three County Fairgrounds and in Marlborough at the Royal Plaza Trade Center, visit http://www.paradisecityarts.com/showlist.html.