Artist For The 2022 Bluemont Fair Poster

Organizers of the 52nd ANNUAL BLUEMONT FAIR, to be held September 17 & 18, 2022, are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s poster design contest: Holly Talada.  Holly’s design was selected from a crowded field of wonderfully creative submissions by artists of all ages from throughout the region, and will grace the Bluemont Fair’s distinctive poster, T-shirt, and other fair memorabilia.  Holly says she loved painting the pastoral scenes around her during her childhood in Round Hill.  She went on to teach art in Loudoun County, as well as many art classes in her community. Her favorite medium is watercolor in plein-air style. She currently resides in Winchester, VA with her two children, Luke and Piper.

Holly’s watercolor rendering of a pair of draft horses, hitched to an antique piece of farming equipment and manned by a figure representing a farmer, reflects the Fair’s 2022 theme, Bluemont’s Draft Horse Farming Era. These “gentle giants” were widely used to do the “heavy lifting” that characterized the agrarian life-style in Bluemont during the 18^th, 19^th, and into the 20^th centuries, before tractors and mechanized farm equipment replaced them.  This year’s theme ties into the current special exhibit at the Plaster Museum of Bluemont Heritage, “Agriculture in Bluemont: 19th Thru 21st Century Farms”, now open to visitors during Bluemont’s Farmers Market on Sundays, 11am-3pm, and  throughout the Bluemont Fair weekend.  The barn in the background of Holly’s art is unmistakably the barn at Glenmeade, the large Bluemont farm owned by the Plaster family for over 200 years. The last resident, Henry Plaster, an extremely important and much loved member of the community, sadly died this year, so Holly’s inclusion of his barn is particularly poignant.