Jennifer Williams used to hang out deep inside her art and deep inside her studio. She was “a studio hermit,” she said, and pretty happy painting all day.
Artists can be like that, she said: introverted and modest, maybe even shy — but also hungry for community, connection, validation of their rich interior worlds. When Williams occasionally did break out of her shell, it was to go visit peers who understood.
“I just like to hang out in artists’ studios,” she told another group where she sought community, the nonprofit, all-volunteer Arts of Clark County. And she sure found it: one of the group’s goals was to extend that special experience to everyone by launching a tour of local artists’ studios. Williams seemed like the natural choice to develop it.
Her creation, the Clark County Open Studios Tour, is now 3 years old. It’s a free, self-guided, weekend-long ramble between 50 artists’ studios. You can visit as few or as many as you please; plan your itinerary by region or route or by previewing works that strike your fancy via the extensive website, ccopenstudios.com, which links to the artists’ individual sites.
Those artists are always chosen by a couple of independent jurors from out of town; that way Williams can recuse herself from having to select and reject her own artistic friends. Jurors this year were Jeannine Grafton, owner of the RiverSea Gallery in Astoria, Ore., and Blake Shell, director of The Art Gym at Marylhurst University. Each brought her own unique sensibility to the selections, Williams said. Having independent jurors also means the tour stays fresh, year after year.
There are 25 newbies and 25 returnees on this year’s tour. Williams emphasized how many of the newbies are actually newcomers to the area — like Jungmoo Ahn and Anne Carroll Gilmour, the former a noted master of traditional Chinese brush techniques who recently settled in the Ellsworth neighborhood, the latter a maker of artisan textiles based in Hockinson.
This year’s trend is welders. After never getting applications from them, Williams said, suddenly this year there were several great welders eager to join the tour — including Jennifer Corio and Dave Frei, Arnada residents whose two-ton metal sculpture “Heart and Stone” started grabbing eyeballs last month near the southeast corner of Esther Short Park.
A similarly huge metal swoop by Corio and Frei is now the centerpiece at downtown’s North Bank Artists Gallery, which is hosting a tour sampler all month. If you can’t see driving all over the county in search of artists’ hideaways — from a ceramics studio in the east county mountains to a houseboat at Kadow’s Marina — Williams hopes you’ll at least visit North Bank. Everything there is for sale, she added, with half of the proceeds going to help the always-struggling artists’ co-op stay in business.
But really, Williams hopes you’ll sample the same joy she’s experienced while exploring amazing corners of Clark County she never saw before, on her way to the studios of amazing Clark County artists she hasn’t met yet. No matter how amazing they are, she said, remember that they’re also just your normal neighbors — working in blue jeans and pursuing their projects while also dealing with the kids, the chores, the dog.
Don’t pretty up your studio for the tour, the guidelines say — just leave it in its natural state. Be yourself. Do your work. But pause to welcome visitors — who might be just as shy as you are.
“People can be intimidated by a gallery,” Williams said. “But this is a way to find out that artists are just like you.”
