By DIANE LAMACCHIA

By DIANE LAMACCHIA

Contributinf Writer

The ride to small town Sperryville rolls west out Route 211 through gently rounded grassy hillocks and the burnished maple trees that guard the road to Die Blue Ridge Mountains.

Several hundred people took the two-hour drive from Washington, D.C. on Oct. 19 in unseasonably warm weather and crossed the She nandoah River to visit Sperryville’s first “Apple Harvest Festival.”

“Artists of the Blue Ridge,’ -ae hub of the festival, featured 45 artMs from the eight-county piedmont arev andwas sponsored by the Rappahannock Association for the Arts and the Community (RAAC) and Faith Mountain Country Fare.

The artists, according to art show coordinator and “neo-colorist” Doug Ball, were a mix of locals and artists who had moved to the region to create in the countryside.

“We called it ‘Artists of the Blue Ridge’ because there are a lot of artists tucked away in these hills,” Ball said. The sponsors hope to hold the exhibit “every year in some form or another,” he added.

A sampling of acrylics, oils, watercolors, photographs, stained glass panels, pottery and soapstone sculptures hung on partitions or stood on wooden tables under sunny autumn skies.

Smiling, blue-jeaned visitors lounged on the grass behind the country store, surrounded by weeping willows, vivid red maples and a white, split rail fence, and watched the New York Street Theatre Caravan sing labor union songs and enact Southern civil rights scenes and a tribute to South African Stephen Biko.

Billowing overhead was a colorful canopy reminiscent of peacock feathers in purples, greens and pinks, designed, Ball said, by local architect Sam Clifton, who also designs solar homes.

Some of the artists complained tfait their work was not selling. One ’iSlftor, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Walter Echwald from Falls Church, said he had net seen anything he Idled enough tobuy. " , But 13-year-old Thomas Spande, a-part-time local, was doing a brisk business. Most of Spande’s small to medium-sized landscapes, neatly painted in acrylic, were of Sperryville and Washington stores and houses done from photos he had taken in bright sunlight.

Spande and his 12-year-old sister, Helen, who sat in front of his paintings trying to concentrate on her book, come regularly with their parents from Bethesda, Md. to weekend in “Jenny Hollow” near Sperryville.

Spande proudly said he had “sold six so far,” priced from $45 to $95, but would not part with a still life of srepen book, a red apple, a pair of dice, a spool of thread and an inlaid wooden box.

“I like it a lot,” he said firmly. “It’s not for sale.”