With one weekend down, the 25th North Coast Open Studios (annual but for the two years cut off by COVID-19), a free, self-guided tour of local artists’ and artisans’ workspaces, wraps up Saturday, June 14, and Sunday, June 15. A DreamMaker project of the Ink People, this year’s roster boasts 154 participating creators.
Coordinator Monica Topping, who took over for Taffy Stockton in 2014, says she inherited “an established and well-organized event, for which I’m grateful every year.” Some of the artists on the tour have been there since the beginning, among them Alan Sanborn, Patricia Sennott, Peggy Loudon, Michelle Murphy Ferguson, Kathy O’Leary and Stock Schlueter.
Late Friday afternoon, O’Leary was still hanging the last pieces for display. “We all cut it pretty close,” she says of her fellow artists with a chuckle. She describes her work as mostly ranging from impressionistic interpretations of natural forms to complete abstractions rendered in acrylics or in oil paint applied with a palette knife. She recalls she was working out of the C Street Studios when she first heard about the fledgling North Coast Open Studios. The prospect was exciting. “It’s such solitary work, so to have people come by and look and maybe buy stuff,” she huffs out a sigh. She jumped on and never looked back.
“Some years, of course, I’d sell more than others. But it was fun and social,” O’Leary says, with a steady roster of people she sees each year, some of whom have been visiting since the beginning. This year, they’ll get a look at a whole new medium from her, as O’Leary has only recently begun experimenting with collage. It’s a chance for her to get some direct feedback on the work, too.
There are also some 38 new participants this year. Topping says she frequently talks with artists about what successful participation in North Coast Open Studios would mean for them. Money, she notes, isn’t guaranteed, but there are other benefits. “They get to have real, actual conversations about, ‘What is your work about?'” Visitors might include established admirers or collectors, as well as those new to the work.
While galleries introduce artists’ work to new audiences, Topping says selling direct has practical rewards. “The money going to those artists is going to buy groceries at local stores and …. put a roof over a human’s head” in Humboldt.
Studios run the gamut. “It’s everything from the kitchen table to a garage to a rented studio space.” (Mark Larson’s photographs of the first weekend, here and in the full slideshow at northcoastjournal.com, are testament to that variety.)
Topping herself is under the “appointment only” section, since North Coast Open Studios’ two weekends are her time for touring. And she goes hard, hitting around 90 studios over the course of the event. Once the preparations are out of her hands, she can enjoy the curiosity and camaraderie like everyone else. While it’s impossible to pick a favorite, she says she likes the live demos best, like watching Stock Schlueter begin a painting from its first streaks of color and seeing it bloom into a landscape. She’s also a sucker for fire, so glass blowing or blacksmithing are always going to draw her. “Having artists who are doing the thing … you get this connection to the work because you get a connection to the person behind the work … it gives it a value beyond a dollar.”
Then it’s back to Topping’s own space, part of a garage rented from a friend, to let people watch her lampwork — melting recycled glass with a torch to make beads she’ll string into jewelry. Examples of her work loop her wrists and she points out one strand made from a whisky bottle, another of pale orbs reborn from a tragically broken Fire and Light plate. The beads on one bracelet made from broken uranium glass glow firefly-green under the tiny black light she carries in her bag.
If you don’t make it to an artist on your list, Topping suggests contacting them for an appointment after the festivities. Open Studios, she points out, may be over, but artists, whether they’re first-timers or veteran participants like O’Leary, are always working on something new.
Visit northcoastopenstudios.com for maps and information on participating artists.Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Wide Open.
