Artists in their Environment ~ the Chelsea/Wakefield Studio Tour…

This is the 3rd or 4th year that I’ve gone on the Chelsea/Wakefield Studio Tour...it is one of my favourites…I imagine that is not only because I've seen some wonderful artists on it, but also because it is so close and is easy for me to get to, as well, it is a tour that takes you through such a pretty area…though I bet the Haliburton County Studio Tour is pretty amazing for both artists and countryside too…but it is a 4 or 5 hour drive from Ottawa…


















This time of year is not only beautiful with the fall colours, it is full to overflowing with studio tours…the Perth Autumn Studio Tour and the Merrickville Tour are both ones I wish I could go on…I’d love to go on all of them…but there is no way…even though Cariño is becoming a wonderfully seasoned studio tour goer and tour driver (this year 6 of us piled into our van and Cariño drove)…it was lots of fun, but if you tried to go to each and every one of them it would take all of your weekends for a month or so! If money was no obstacle, maybe…then you could travel about, staying in charming country inns, eating out…ya…dream on…the other thing, though…is that all that beautiful eye candy can become overwhelming…and it can get difficult if you see too many things that you just have to have and you can’t buy everything…these things can end up speaking to you and haunting you…I also get so inspired by all that I see that I can imagine, if I kept going and seeing without the time in between to get back to my creating, I might just explode…













I do love studio tours though…I love seeing artists in their environment…love looking into peoples homes…my job takes me into peoples homes to work on their computers, so I am used to entering peoples living spaces…some of the places on this tour were simply breathtaking…beautiful remote locations…in the woods, overlooking the river, on twisty, scenic back gravel roads…I saw more that a few places I would love to live in!














Of the 22 artists participating in this tour, we saw 14…that was all we could fit in on the 1 day that we could all get together to go…Cariño and I played the game of virtual shopping…deciding at each place what we would buy if we could…we spent a lot of virtual money! It would have been impossible for me to decide on only 1 virtual purchase from the day…it seemed that each place we went to became my new favourite…


















Now, after almost a week of it settling in, I think Marie-France Nitski resonates the strongest for me in the painting category…I love the bright, bold colours she uses and the wild and free expression in her pieces…I fell in love with her piece called “Bread and Roses”…but there are a few of Linda Wright’s paintings that I am still thinking about too…especially one that had wonderful aqua blue colours, textures and worn paper with a fish skeleton image and a canoe…also her impressionistic textured pieces that looked, to me, like landscapes were wonderful…her web site doesn’t show the pieces I’m talking about, but you can get the idea from her page on the studio site…and John Barkley had a massive portrait that he was working on…it isn’t on his web site yet…it was huge! I like the way he uses tons of paint…I love tons of paint…great globs of it…so I was attracted to that aspect of his paintings…


















We also saw Ross Rooke’s wood turning…absolutely beautiful…he gave us a tour of his workshop and I think I saw a glimmer of interest in Cariño’s eyes…maybe something he would like to do…Glen Foster makes finely crafted, unique tables…letting some of the natural form of the wood remain in the design…there was a sumac table where he had split the piece of sumac and mirrored it together side by side to for the table top…it was exquisite…Russ Zeitz, another woodworker creates wonderful mixed media, sculptural 3D pictures, rustic furniture and funky sculptures…
























































Diane Lemire is an artist I have admired for a few years now…her works in cement intrigue me…I fell in love with a bird bath I saw at her place a few years ago…it had different types of cement, leaf impressions and a blue and white china ball partly submerged in the bowl part of it…it has been speaking to me for a long time now…


















Something out of character happened to me on the tour…I usually don’t get overly excited about jewellery, but I fell in love with a necklace that Susan Glazer made…it was a scrumptious blue…she had made it by crocheting the coloured copper-cored wire…really neat…her dancing diva’s were fun too…


















We stopped in Wakefield for lunch at Chez Eric…had a lovely lunch and good wine…I had the quiche which came nicely presented…












The tour is on again this weekend if you are in the area and can go…it is well worth it…lots of yummy eye candy…I would have liked to have seen the rest of the artists on the tour, but right now I find myself sitting in another beautiful spot – my Mom’s cottage on the Bruce Peninsula overlooking a wild and restless Georgian Bay…from almost the exact opposite shore of my sister’s cottage…same bay, but so different on each side…


















I missed the Bruce Peninsula Autumn Studio Tour…but there are is a nice gallery just up the road a bit in Tobermory…Circle Arts…I should be able to make it to 260 Fingers though…