Studio Tour

Excellent weekend for 30th annual Studio Tour

Afine weekend brought increased traffic through many of the studios participating in this year’s Studio Tour. At its inception in 1993 as an initiative by Peta Hall, the tour comprised just a handful of studios centred in the Bloomfield area, and it has since grown to cover almost every corner of the County. This year, 29 studios and 42 artists took part in the tour on its 30th anniversary—there was no tour in 2020. “The tour is special every year because it’s different than walking in to see a gallery. What we’re doing is inviting people to share the creative spirit, see the location where the art is made and share the artists’ habitat,” said Heather Kerr, co-chair of the tour committee. “You can see a painting or sculpture in the context of where it was made and you can get a chance to talk to the artist about the creative process. It really attracts people who are interested in creativity and art.” This is Ms. Kerr’s third year on the tour. She is a relative newcomer to the County and she joined the Arts Council as a way to meet other local artists and creators. She works mostly in acrylics and until recently painted abstracts of the interior landscapes in her thoughts. Over the past couple of years she has shifted to an abstract impression of the exterior landscape, inspired by the magnificent sky vistas from her home in Cherry Valley. “The skies here are incredible, and I’ve been drawn to that. It’s about a connection to the clouds and the landscape and the environment and the feeling of that,” she said.

Ms. Kerr is sharing her studio space with two invited artists. She said that having artists share their studio space makes the tour more inclusive. “There are a lot of artists who don’t have the studio space that would be accessible to the public, or separate enough from their family space for the general public to be invited into,” she said. One of her guest artists is Andreas Krätschmer, who on last year’s tour displayed his work in a tent on his driveway in Picton. He creates lathe-turned pieces using locally salvaged wood that had been designated for the chipper or the fireplace. He was originally interested in cabinet making, but switched to wood turning about 10 years ago. He leaves his pieces with a natural finish, or sometimes chars then in fire to provide a distinctive look. “Fire is a non-traditional approach,” he said. “I only use locally sourced wood. I’m an environmentalist, and it’s a renewable resource.”

Debra Vincent is another of Ms. Kerr’s guest artists. She is from Tyendinaga and is a Mohawk of the Bear clan. Her work is inspired by her Haudenosaunee culture and she uses a palette of bright colours influenced by the colours of the medicine wheel—red, yellow, black and white. She uses many motifs from her Indigenous culture, and is particularly drawn to feathers. “Birds are important to us. They are our closest beings to the sky world. Birds carry our messages—of sadness, of thanks, of gratefulness—back and forth, and those birds leave us feathers as reminders.”

Fabric artist Sandra Pim was a guest of Terry Culbert and Barb Högenauer at their studio in Mountainview. This is her fifth year on the tour and her second as a guest of this studio. She makes vessels and flat pieces out of coiled cotton rope and fabric. She is a self-taught artist and has been making these pieces for about 11 years. “I love the colour and the texture and what you can adorn it with,” she said. She added that it has been a good weekend for her, with good sales and a lot of traffic through the studio. “Visitors love to come to this house and see these artists. They are such fun people,” she said of her hosts.