Next weekend, 50 artists will place welcome signs outside their work spaces for the Clark County Open Studios tour. Visitors can stop by as many or as few studios as they wish from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 8 and 9.
The artists are as diverse as their addresses: K.C. Madsen, chair of Arts of Clark County, operates from her downtown Vancouver space; Monte Wolverton, a widely syndicated cartoonist, lives past Battle Ground Lake State Park.
o What: The Clark County Open Studios self-guided tour features 50 participating artists opening their workspaces.
o When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 8 and 9.
o Where: Across Clark County, from downtown Vancouver to Camas to Battle Ground. Printed guides will be available at artists’ studios, as well as online.
o What: The Clark County Open Studios self-guided tour features 50 participating artists opening their workspaces.
o When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 8 and 9.
o Where: Across Clark County, from downtown Vancouver to Camas to Battle Ground. Printed guides will be available at artists' studios, as well as online.
o More information at event's website.
o More information at event’s website.
The second year of this event features 27 returning artists, plus 23 new participants, said Jennifer Williams, one of the tour’s organizers. She is with Arts of Clark County, the nonprofit group looking to connect local artists and art organizations into a larger community.
The tour is capped at 50 artists to keep the event manageable, with applications selected through a juried process.
The success of last year’s event can be measured in the more than 80 artists who applied this year, along with the rough estimates of visitors. Over the two days last year, rural studios saw around 150 visitors, while more centralized locations greeted more than 300 people, said Williams, also a participating artist in this year’s tour. Visitors came from as far as Seattle and across the bridge from Portland and Salem, Ore., but the studio tour also featured many people who had never stepped into an art gallery.
“Different groups ask different questions; they bring out different things to think about. It’s a neat experience. I have to reflect very deeply on who I am as an artist, on what I’m doing, and what brought me to this place,” said Williams. “It’s a challenge to dig that deep.”
Camas artist Paul Solevad went on the tour last year as a visitor. In addition to art lovers and curious community members, other artists enjoy the peek into a peer’s workspace.
The studio tour encouraged Solevad to become more involved in the art community, and he said that the tour’s awareness will only help it grow.
“It’s important for Clark County to get on the map, to pull (grant) money down from northern Washington and pull the attention down too,” he said.
Solevad’s paintings range from urban landscapes of Portland to portraits of presidents, all painted on wood panels. “I do a lot of work that I call surreal expressionism, trying to express the feeling of our time,” he said. “Every artist expresses the time that they live in.”
His paintings include people on their cellphones and landscapes of being stuck on the freeway. “I was driving along and thought ‘Oh, I should paint this, this is my reality. Along with a ton of other people’s.’ “
It will also mark a fresh start in his Camas studio space. “The space is small but with a great open feeling. It should be fun to hear people’s reactions,” said Solevad.
Children welcome
One group of visitors he’s hoping to see is children, he said. Solevad used to teach night classes at Portland Community College and worked as substitute art teacher. “I have two girls always seeing how I work. With schools cutting out art from their curriculums, I think it’s important for kids to see artists working and a viable part of our culture and our community,” he said.
The tour has made an effort to reach out to the art teachers of Clark County this year, said Williams, thanks in part to the work of participating artist Michael Smith, a teacher at Woodland High School.
Visitors have a chance to see the entire art process from beginning to end, with a much more approachable tone, in contrast to a more formal gallery show where the art is curated and chosen by the gallery owner.
“In a gallery everything is clean and sterile; it’s really presented in a totally different atmosphere. (A work) looks better in a gallery, where in your studio it’s more natural, organic,” said David Schwarz. An artist for more than 30 years, Schwarz’s work is a mixture of glass and steel. He creates multilayered orbs that combine different glass techniques, including making his own lenses, metal stands and etched drawings.
“When I’m in a gallery, I’m lot more philosophical about the work; it’s a lot more process-oriented in the studio,” he said. “People get to see the technique.”
His work focuses on the interaction between the world and how it’s distorted by his pieces’ optics. He encourages audience interaction as his pieces act like kaleidoscopes, with lenses changing the architecture and nature images that Schwarz has etched into the colored glass. His March show at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland featured 12 pieces, and represented a year of work. Though he can blow a piece of glass in two hours, it will take a month of cold work — etching, polishing and layering — to complete a large piece, he said.
For the tour, he will be blowing glass using the furnace, letting visitors see hot glass work. Schwarz said last year’s event was especially positive, and he was surprised by the number of people who came up to Ridgefield to visit.
Visitors to Anne John’s Hazel Dell studio can peer into a studio home to almost 50 years of painting. John sets a goal to create 40 pieces a year, from figurative paintings to mixed-media works. Her pieces often feature animals in allegorical scenes. “I’m a narrative artist. Most of my pieces have a story,” she said. “I love it when people bring their own story to the piece, so it’s this conversation between the viewer and the piece.”
John was part of last year’s tour, where she drew a diverse crowd. “I never stopped talking,” she said. “It was absolutely exhausting and lots of fun.” Her two granddaughters, students at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, help with the studio tour and handle the sales.
“To say you’re an artist means that you work, hard. That’s the wonderful part of the tour, you get to see just how hard we do work. That we do this every day of our lives,” said John. She suggests visiting artists whose work speaks to you.
The tour also offers the chance for visitors to buy original works of art directly from their creators. Unlike an art gallery, the accessibility of the tour makes art ownership seem more attainable for visitors.
“(Last year’s event) I had two people buy art for the very first time,” said Williams. “It’s promoting the arts in general to a new group of people.”
“There’s nothing like walking into a house and seeing honest-to-goodness art on the walls,” said John. “You don’t have to be a rich person, you just have to be a curious, interested person, you don’t even have to have an art background. It’s just like that saying ‘I know what I like and I like what I know.’ “
For a map of the tour, click here.
