PEC Studio Tour

Artists welcome visitors to their studios

The thirty-third annual Prince Edward County Studio Tour took place this past weekend, with 58 artists showing their work at 39 studios spanning the County from Carrying Place to Cressy, and Mountainview to Milford. There was a wide variety of artistic disciplines covered by the tour, including ceramics, fibre art, sculpture, metalworking, glass art, woodworking and photography. The tour opened on Friday, and visitors could take advantage of the slightly quieter time to have more detailed conversations with the artists and guests in each studio. Saturday and Sunday were busier, but still provided plenty of opportunities to see the artists and speak to them about their work.

The Studio Tour has a good mix of artists who have been long-time participants, as well as new artists and those who just have a couple of years of tour experience behind them. Stefan Duerst is a metal sculptor who sees the parallels between transforming metal with fire and the human process of growth and change. Mr. Duerst began his career as an artist blacksmith following a three-year apprenticeship and two years as a journeyman. He then obtained his master trade certificate so that he could open his own studio. “I learned how to work with metal, how to shape metal with my mentor Herbert Elflein, one of the best blacksmiths I’ve ever encountered,” he said. He mostly uses mild steel to create his pieces. He uses a plasma cutter to cut the metal to the shape he wants, and then uses a forge to heat up the metal so that it becomes malleable. “You have to heat it up to just the right temperature. You have to know how the metal moves, and what’s possible. It’s almost like a dance with the metal. Steel is such a structural metal, known for its rigidity. But once you heat it up you can do things that you can’t really do with any other material. Then it cools down and regains its structural integrity. I’m really fascinated by that. Steel has to go through fire in order to change, and you can take exactly the same concept t a person— sometimes you have to go through a fire and transform if you want to change something,” he said. Mr. Duerst is inspired by flow and movement and works intuitively to shape the metal to his liking. “I look at it as a frozen snapshot of a moment,” he said.

This is Tim Snyder’s second year on the Studio Tour. He has a 30-year career as a commercial artist and illustrator. Over the past few years he has been painting a lot more, inspired by his kayak paddles along Black Creek and into Lake Ontario. He takes his paint kit with him on these paddles, making small sketches in gouache that will be used as studies for larger pieces in oil watercolour or acrylic.

While he will go out on these paddle adventures at any time of the day, his favourite time is later in the day towards evening.

“I really like the quality of light in that moment just before sunset,” he said. Next Saturday, September 26, he will be leading a watercolour walk along the County’s south shore with the South Shore Joint Initiative, and he will have an exhibit of his paintings at Arts on Main Gallery in October.

Howard Goldberg tries to create photographs that draw upon the look of the great painters of the sixteenth century and beyond. Mr. Goldberg has had a long interest in photography, starting a 10-yearold and then doing the yearbook photos in high school. He had a career as a documentary filmmaker and editor, and only occasionally used photography as a research tool. That changed after he moved to the County in 2017 and his passion for photography was reignited. “We’re surrounded by beauty here and it’s very easy to fall in love with the imagery around here,” he said. “I’ve been trying of light and shadows that you see in the great painters from the 1500s onwards. I’ve also been doing more abstract photo-montages where I take elements from our everyday life and juxtapose them against beautiful seascapes.” He uses commercially available programs to manipulate his images, but he has also written his own software for image processing to get the specific effects he wants. “I will start from an image and then alter it to look more like the lighting of a painting,” he said.

J Douglas Thompson moved to the County 13 years ago and this is his 12th year on the Studio Tour. He started painting seriously when he was just 14 years old and had a gallery representation at age 17. He went to a technical school in Toronto the offered 30 periods of art each week with five different art teachers each day. “It was like going to art college in high school, which was really life-saving for me,” he said. He worked as a commercial artist and lived abroad for 30 years, working with not-for-profit groups. He had his own advertising business for 25 years, before moving to the County. He renovated the garage attached to the house for use as a studio, and restored one of the outbuildings as a gallery space. His sweeping landscape paintings convey a sense of majesty and a promise of hope. Many contain the motif of a white pine, which Mr. Thompson says is a metaphor for his faith. “My theme, really, is how does light and water interact? Light is really, really important, and I’m trying to show how there’s hope through light,” he said. His paintings are often quite large, and this reflects the needs of his clients (through his gallery representations) which are often corporations and interior designers. He also takes commissions. The images he creates are mostly from his imagination. He has travelled to over 70 countries and has a wealth of images in his memory. He will sometimes do a quick pencil sketch on his travels and use that as a template for a larger piece. He said that he has really enjoyed being a part of the Studio Tour. “It’s been wonderful to meet people and have conversations,” he said.