Attica wife & husband duo take Best in Show at Lewiston Art Festival

Lewiston Art Festival photos

By Joshua Maloni

GM/Managing Editor

“Stag with Magpies” was named “Modern Art Awards” Best in Show Saturday at the 60^th annual Lewiston Art Festival. The mixed media piece was crafted by Attica couple Magen and Dylan Pratt, who operate Wood & Water Artistry.

“I am so shocked. It feels so validating,” Magen said. “It's been a journey jumping off of what I was doing before. I was a general manager at a store. That was my full-time job. And then we had two little boys at home now. This is what we do on the weekends when we have time to go out and work. This is my full-time job now. This is very validating.”

“I'm insanely proud of her,” Dylan said. “It's cool to see it being recognized for the way that I've always seen it.”

The winning piece, “It's a stag with magpies on a slab of maple wood,” Magen said. “I use pyrography to burn the line art, and then it's painted with watercolors, so it kind of acts like a stain on the wood. It still keeps this wood texture showing through.

“The piece itself symbolizes the natural relationship between the stags and the magpies. The magpies will eat the ticks and protect the stag in that way, and they get to use its fur shed for their nests.”

“Modern Art Awards” Best in Show at the 2026 Lewiston Art Festival: “Stag with Magpies” by Magen and Dylan Pratt.

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Art Festival judge Maureen Kellick said all five jurors were “drawn to this submission.”

“The raw natural wood (material) was accented by the delicate painting and line work. Additionally, the theme (subject) worked with the medium and presentation," she said. “A beautifully executed piece!”

Speaking of the inspiration for the piece, Magen said, “I do a lot of natural things with my work. I'm always looking for natural relationships and things like that, that feel whimsical, and that most people may not know about. They might seem kind of ordinary on their own, but being able to paint it and kind of bring it to life makes it feel more magical.”

Dylan said, “This one actually came from a stump carving I did. I've done so many that it's hard to remember exactly, but I remember the piece of wood had, like, this rippling, and it was really beautiful. So, I brought it home and I showed it to her, and I'm like, ‘What do you think of this?’ Because this was kind of our first time, our first piece that we've done for our run of slabs. So, it's kind of the first mark – a big, ambitious one – for the future pieces that we want to do.”

Though Magen (watercolor painting) and Dylan (carving) each have about a decade of experience, “We've only been vending for about a year now,” she explained. “Me and my husband work together. He's a chainsaw artist, so he brings me all of the wood cutoffs from his chainsaw carvings. A lot of what you see in our booth … a lot of it comes down in storms and things like that. They go to people's houses and carve the stumps. He brings me back the cutoffs, and he used some of his cutoffs. So, it's all kind of upcycled wood if you think about it in balance.

“A lot of our pieces are experimental at this point. The winning piece, we really like working on slabs of wood. I can do a lot with them. But we use a lot of different kinds of woods, a lot of different shapes of wood.”

She noted, “This is our first time at Lewiston,” as a festival participant, “and we are loving it.”

“It's in an area that we don't come to very often,” Magen said. “We live in Attica, so we're about an hour and a half away. It's a bit of a travel for us to really go anywhere, even in New York state. But we like the area a lot. We've been to a lot of different things here in Lewiston. We've gone to Artpark. We've been to lots of concerts there. We like the area and we just like the general vibe here.”

Wood & Water Artistry is online at www.ArtofWoodandWater.com.

At the 2026 Lewiston Art Festival.

Large crowds walk Center Street.

Thomas P. Asklar

Marshall Burns

Angel to Apple

Joelle’s Dolls

Marianne Guthrie, an Emerging Artist Showcase participant.

Aurora Treasures

The Indigenous Experience at Hennepin Park.

Tom Hanna Original Watercolors

DiCamillo Bakery ice cream cookies sandwiches

Apple Granny Restaurant

Casa Antica

Veterans of Foreign Wars Downriver Post 7487

Lewiston/Niagara-on-the-Lake Rotary

Niagara University Repertory Theatre (N.U.R.T.)

The 2026 Lewiston Art Festival “Modern Art Awards” judging panel and submitted pieces.