More than 200 artists will exhibit their work at the 16th Annual DeLand Fall Festival of the Arts, from 10 to 5 in downtown DeLand this weekend, November 22-23.

Along with paintings, sculpture, glass, jewelry and other artworks, an International Food Court, music and other entertainment will be set up along Woodland Boulevard between Howry and Wisconsin avenues.

Among the artists exhibiting are:

William Cowherd

William Cowherd, from Indiana, will exhibit in DeLand for the first time this year. Cowherd works in 3-D multi-media, he says, "combining painting with sculpture to create everything from abstractions to realistic figuratives."

The artist first made money from art as a 13-year-old and has worked full-time as an artist for 15 years. He currently exhibits at 25 to 30 festivals a year and is a frequent award-winner.

"Inspiration comes from all over - from simple things like a bug walking across my path to an orchestral movement or even a dream," Cowherd says. "But I'd say I'm mostly inspired by African sculpture."

"I like the purity of the forms," he adds. "They don't use any sophisticated tools, yet what they do is very beautiful."

Larry East

Larry East, from Decatur, Georgia, also brings metal and clay together, in this came by combining steel and raku pottery.

"Clay has such great properties - you can treat it like wood, paint it, work it in so many different ways," he says.

"I do a lot of recycling," he says. "So a lot of the time, I get ideas while preparing, laying out keys, saw blades, and things like that to pierce into the clay."

"Raku is an oriental style of firing," he explains. "Once the piece reaches 1,95 degrees, it is immediately removed." That gives the glaze its distinctive characteristic, but it also weds the steel with the clay.

"When you fire raku, you have no idea what you're going to get," he adds. "The copper glaze can turn out anywhere from shiny like a penny to green like the Statue of Liberty. And you're putting a lot of stress on the pieces because of the firing and cooling, so every piece that makes it through the process is going to be exciting."

Jack Hill

Jack Hill works with clay and metal, casting clay sculptures in bronze. Bronze casting is a 5,000-year-old process that hasn't changed much since Egyptians started doing it, he says.

"I started as a woodcarver, and made the transition 12 or 14 years ago," he says. "Working in clay I have a lot more flexibility, but when it's cast in bronze, it gains a permanence you don't find in any other medium. They still dig up bronze that was made thousands of years ago - there's a lot to be said for that kind of permanence."

For now, Hill mostly sells his work on the outdoor art show circuit. "Bronze is relatively costly to produce, because it's so labor intensive," he explains. "In a gallery, the price ends up out of reach for a lot of people, but by doing the show circuit, I can cut out that 40-60 percent portion the galleries would take."

Hill's parents live in DeLand, so he started doing the show four or five years ago. He exhibits at about 20 shows per year, a dozen in Florida and another six or eight in Colorado.

Before going to work as a sculptor, Hill worked in theater. "I did mime and magic," he says. "I worked with Marcel Marceau - got to know him pretty well." He moved to Florida, where he lived on a sailboat in the Keys and created nautically-inspired pieces, like mermaids and figures from mythology.

Now Hill is known for anthropomorphizing otherwise inanimate objects, sculpting an apple core that is also the torsos of Adam and Eve, for example.

"Sometimes an idea will percolate for years," he says. "For example, I have a series of anthropomorphic bananas. Initially, I saw them as clowns in banana split. Now I have bananas with roller skates or clown shoes, things like that."

Patricia Karnes

Patricia Karnes lives in Winter Park and has exhibited her hand-constructed one-of-a-kind works at the DeLand festival every year since its inception.

Inspiration for her highly sculptural designs comes from a variety of visual cues, Karnes says. "I might see an arrangement of something and think, you could turn that idea into a broach," she says. "Or maybe I have a stone I like and want to design something around it."

Today, Karnes exhibits her work at 14 to 16 shows per year and often earns awards. But she started working with jewelry after earning a bachelors degree in painting. In 1971, while attending the University of Michigan, she signed up for an art fair.

"Lo and behold, people bought things from me," Karnes laughs. "I was very excited to learn you could make something, and people would buy it."

"I like festivals better than galleries," she adds. "I like the personal interaction with people who are going to wear my work, and I find people enjoy learning how a piece was made and getting to know the person who made it."

Michael Myers

Michael Myers lives in Neptune Beach and is "a rare Florida native," with a longtime interest in art, music and writing. While he entered the DeLand show in the oils and acrylics category, he has also exhibited large-format black and white photography for many years.

Myers grew up in Gainesville and earned a degree in journalism from the University of Florida. "I have been, since childhood, interested in writing, painting, photography and music, and still find it hard to focus on one area," he says. While in college, he took a photojournalism class "and was totally consumed by the possibilities."

While working as a photojournalist and shooting corporate work for a medical center in Jacksonville, Myers spent weekends exhibiting personal, black and white photography at outdoor art shows. He does about 25 shows each year. This season, he'll split the schedule between exhibiting paintings and photographs.

His ideas and inspiration come from graphic and fine art, music, literature, and day-to-day life. "The bottom line is, it's all about communicating," he says. "When someone looks at a painting, it either speaks to them or it doesn't. When it does, that's a wonderful thing."

"Painting, for me, is an adventure, a true creative journey," he says. "After so many years of the exacting requirements of black and white landscape photography, I find painting an overwhelming release. And as DeKooning said, it's so satisfying to do something that's been done for 30,000 years."

Warner Whitfield

Warner Whitfield creates one-of-a-kind ornaments, wildlife sculptures and other designs from blown glass. "When I started out 35 years ago, there were very few people willing to teach this - it was kind of a trade secret," Whitfield says.

"I was very fortunate to work with a gentleman who came here from Germany and had been glass blower all his life," he adds. "He taught me techniques that had been in his family for generations."

Whitfield lives in Ocala and shows his work at both festivals and galleries. He frequently wins awards, including eight or more from festivals this year.

He likes the medium in part because working with 3,500-degree molten glass is such a creative challenge.

"It has a taffy-like texture," he says. "You twist it, shape it, work it with gravity - every piece is completely free formed."

"I start out with an idea, but have to let the glass flow the way it wants to," he says. "But a lot of times the best design comes out when you're in the middle of working on a piece. You'll see something else in the glass, and just go with that, and end up with a wonderful design."

Veronica Zakharov

Veronica Zakharov began exhibiting her work in DeLand not long after she switched from painting and printmaking to jewelry. "In printmaking, you work with copper plates," she explains. "Sometimes, when a plate didn't turn out, I would make it into a copper bracelet. That taught me a lot about the texture of metal."

Today, she works with Precious Metal Clay, a mixture of silver, gold or bronze dust, water and a binder. The jewelry is created much like hand-built pottery - worked like clay and fired in a kiln, where the binder burns away leaving behind pure metal - to create 3-dimensional forms she says reflect the human condition and inspired by the infinite variety of forms found on the beach and in nature.

"The material is very interesting - it gives you different textural qualities, and you can make it any shape you want," she says. "I liked painting, but with this, someone can literally wear your piece. You feel more connected to your audience, and that makes a big difference for me."