Manteo First Friday-Spectacular Beginning for 2014

By Kip Tabb

First Friday on Budleigh Street, downtown Manteo

First Friday in Manteo is back–and given how perfect the weather was last night for the first gathering of 2014, it would be hard to imagine a better way to start the year.

It wasn’t just the weather that made it such a great evening. Roanoke Island Festival Park was hosting the Dare County High Schools Art Show–with some amazing works of creativity from all three local high schools. It would be just about impossible to pick out any one work as the best. Some of them were disturbing, some were beautiful and all of them deserved a second or third look.

The show will run through the month of April. It’s free, so there is no excuse for not checking this out.

Over at the Dare County Arts Council, George Cheeseman was the featured artist. He works in watercolors and his art has a light, wonderful air about it. Many of his paintings are nautically themed and seem almost simple in execution but in fact have all the elements of the finest art.

For regular First Friday attendees, George is usually the bartender at the donation wine bar at the DCAC Gallery.

It seemed a perfect way to put the thoroughly miserable winter weather behind us. People were in the streets in shorts and shirt sleeves; Full Moon Cafe was serving dinner at their sidewalk cafe; the Jazzmen were swinging on the steps of the Courthouse and down the alley next to Ortega’z live music was filling the air . . . again.