Battle Ground residents Val Hambley and her husband, Ken Wong, have visited art galleries, but it’s just not the same as getting to step into an artist’s studio.
That’s one reason the couple has attended the Clark County Open Studios Tour for three straight years, they said Sunday while walking through the studio of oil painter Edi Olson, who is headquartered at the Knights of Pythias Active Retirement Center in west Vancouver. The painting teacher was one of 50 artists from across Clark County who let the public watch her in action over the weekend as part of the tour.
“We like to talk to them,” Hambley said of the artists. “We love this.”
Olson was joined in her studio by one of her students, Bonnie Junell, who has become a professional painter. As Junell painted a landscape with red-orange poppies in the foreground and a mountain, white clouds and blue skies as the backdrop, she briefly talked about her former life as an executive for Nordstrom.
She took an early retirement from that job in 2006 and soon started painting classes with Olson.
“Ever since I started painting in oil, it’s like crazy passion,” Junell said.
Junell’s art sells in galleries in Florida and Oregon, and she teaches “sip and paint” classes at Latte Da Coffee House and Wine Bar in Vancouver, where her pupils drink wine while they learn.
“I really just saw it as just my passion and my pleasure,” she said of painting. “Now it’s a part-time business. … It’s so fun.”
Junell specializes in realistic impressionism; she uses broad brush strokes, and although her paintings don’t look exactly like their subjects, it’s easy to tell what she’s painted. Olson’s oil paintings fall under the realism category.
Olson began teaching painting classes in 1980 and continues to teach free classes for residents of the retirement center. At Olson’s encouragement, one of her students at the retirement home recently hosted an art show and made $1,200 selling art, she said.
“I love bringing the art out of the painter,” Olson said. “I want to bring out that ‘wow’ without changing the (artist’s) personality.”
Later on Sunday, Hambley and Wong visited welded-sculpture artists at Cobalt Designworks in Vancouver’s Uptown Village area. Among the artists there were Cobalt Designworks’ business owners, husband-and-wife team Dave Frei and Jennifer Corio.
The couple worked together at Hewlett-Packard Co. until 2001, when Corio took a leave of absence from her marketing job and enrolled in Clark College’s welded-sculpture class.
“I had every intention to go back” to HP, Corio said, but “I had explored this new world, and was loving it, and I never went back.”
Frei followed, leaving his engineering job in 2007.
“We decided to merge our skills,” Corio said. She designs their large, metal sculptures, while Frei pieces them together in their shop using his metal fabrication know-how.
Their designs include 14-foot-tall metal tulips, a bronze figure of a woman and the 12-foot-tall “Heart and Stone” sculpture recently installed near Esther Short Park in downtown Vancouver. Frei said part of his challenge is turning artistic concepts into public sculptures that can withstand the elements, and perhaps even people climbing or hanging on them.
More than 100 people came through Olson’s studio over the weekend. Corio estimated nearly 200 would come through Cobalt Designworks by Sunday evening.
Hambley and Wong said they couldn’t possibly hit every studio on the self-guided tour, but they picked about 10 stops in their tour brochure, trying to find a good variety of artists.
“We try to hit the new (artists on the tour),” Hambley said. Then, “we go to some favorites that we’ve been to before. … It’s wonderful.”
Occasionally, they even purchase a new piece of art while on the tour, they said.
