New Artists. New Art Work. New Places to Tour.

Denise McDonald

This year, 42 new artists are opening their studios October 17^th and 18^th giving art lovers young and old a chance to make art connections all across Washington County, Oregon.  

You’ll see demonstrations in a wonderful and eclectic range of art media.  Whether you’re interested in 3 D or 2 D art, there’s something for you.  See steel forging, glass fusing, weaving, wood working as well as throwing clay, mask making and copper repousse.   Watch an artist work with encaustics, watercolors, acrylic or oil on canvas, pastels, silk painting and more.

There might just be an artist right in your own Washington County neighborhood.  Whether you live in the city, suburbs or out in the country, we have artists on the tour from Aloha, Beaverton, Sherwood, Tigard and Portland to Banks, Cornelius, Forest Grove, Gaston, North Plains and Hillsboro.

Here are a few inspirations shared by some of our artists. 

Lorraine Pascuzzi says, “Seeing something beautiful in nature and letting the imagination take hold.”

 

Lorraine Pascuzzi

“I am inspired by all kinds of things. Nature, dreams, visual images, weird things that I see or experience,” says Sierra Lonepine Briano.

 

 

Sierra Lonepine Briano

Her inspiration, Darla Boljat says, “The challenge to recreate the beauty that I see.”

Darla Boljat

For artist, Ana Quinn, “My cats, ancient art forms, and the life cycle of the salmon.”

 

Ana Quinn

 Stay tuned here to read more blogs featuring individual artists as they talk about their inspirations, studios and work process.

To see some of the art before the tour, check out our new Pinterest page https://www.pinterest.com/WashCoArts

Find weekly and soon, daily updates on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Washington-County-Art-Alliance

Figure out which artists are in your neighborhood on our website at  www.washcoart.org

Studio Tour Artists Spring Shows.

Fiber Work by Terry Grant

 It’s spring and our artists are popping up everywhere.  Here are some places to see our 2014 tour artist shows.

Terry Howard Grant:

Art On Broadway: Stepping Into Spring and Guest Show.

Terry Grant said, "I just delivered my work to Art on Broadway, for their Spring Boutique show/sale. I was so pleased to be asked to be a guest artist for this show. My new small stitched "drawings" will be shown for the first time.”

This show features guest artists and 20 award winning gallery members of Art On Broadway exhibiting a variety of media including glass, ceramics, jewelry, wood, paintings and mixed media.  Opening reception is Saturday, April 11 from 6-9pm.  The show runs through May 1. 

Pam Nichols:

In April, Pam will be featured at 503 Uncorked in Sherwood, Oregon.  “Come join me for my ending artist reception.  Enjoy wine and art and live music,” said Pam.  The reception is Friday, April 17 starting at 5:30pm.

In June, Pam opens her solo art show entitled “Fusion: Rust & Wax” at Art On Broadway.  Opening reception is June 13 from 6-9pm and the show runs through June 27.

Sgraffito Bowl by Susan Gallacher-Turner

Susan Gallacher-Turner, Barbara Hertel, Ana Quinn:

Ceramic Showcase at Veterans Memorial Coliseum May 1, 2, 3.

“This is my second year in the Group Booth and I just can’t wait.  It’s always such a beautiful show filled with amazing work,” said Susan Gallacher-Turner. 

This year, Ceramic Showcase features a benefit installation entitled, Plates of Plenty.  Showcase members have donated plates and platters to raise money for Growing Gardens, a local non-profit helping low income families and schools grow their own food. 

Beautiful functional and sculptural clay work, clay demonstrations, a clay play table for children and adults and live music!  It’s all free!  More information and directions click http://www.ceramicshowcase.com/

Ceramic Showcase in a new location: Veterans Memorial Coliseum

Over 200 northwest artists

10am-7pm Friday and Saturday, 10am-5pm Sunday. 

2014 Downtown Beaverton Art Walk

 Sharon Orella and Darla Boljat:

“I think this is a great opportunity for artists and art lovers,” says Sharon Orella.

Sharon will be showing newly created small copper pieces.  

Art Walk in Downtown Beaverton May 1 from 5 to 8pm. 

Get info on the 2015 Washington County Open Studios Tour.  Enjoy live music, demonstrations and lots of great art.

Copper Repousse by Sharon Orella

Artist to Artist: Tools for Resizing Your Photos

If you've been making art and entering shows for awhile you remember having to send slides of your work with your entries What a hassle and expense that was! Now we just email a digital image. So much easier—if you know how! You can't just send any old photo. There is always a very specific size and format requirement. 

Over the past few years as registrar for the Open Studios I have seen that preparing those photos, and especially resizing them, seems to be a stumbling block for a number of our artists. Last year I pointed you to a couple tutorials on our Facebook page. This year I thought you might want to know about a couple of free tools that can help.

Adobe Photoshop is, of course, the standard. But Photoshop is not cheap and may be more than you will ever need. There is a nice little free program called Gimp, which runs on both Mac and Windows computers.

Gimp has many of the same features as Photoshop and will allow you to adjust your photo in a number of ways and resize it to your specifications. There are online tutorials that will take you through it.

If you are using an iPhone or iPad, here is a very nifty little app that is as simple as can be. It is called "Image Resizer +". Just search for it on your online App Store. It's just 99 cents, and has none of the editing features of Gimp or Photoshop. It just resizes photos, which may be all you need. It is available for iPad and iPhone. (There is an Android app called "photo resizer" that is probably similar, but I don't have experience with it.)

Here's how it works. First, be sure your photo is cropped to exclude any unwanted background, and saved in an album on your phone or tablet. Open the Resizer app and click on "photo" and find your photo in its album.

Your photo will come up with the information about its size in the box on the right.

This shows that my photo is currently 1481 pixels wide by 1695 pixels high. I need it to be 1200 pixels on its longest side, so I move to the next section down and choose that I will resize it by entering pixels, rather than a percentage. Then below that I will select the height (because that is my longest side) and type in 1200, then click "next," which will decrease the pixels in width proportionally and then "done".

Now I can see that my image size is 1049 pixels by 1200 pixels. Perfect!

The last step is to click "share" and save it to your album. You will now have two versions of the same photo in your album, so remember that the last one added is the resized photo.

Some things to remember:

• Your photos need to be clear, straight, and the color correct.
• If your work is irregular in shape, be sure to photograph it on a white background, lighted to eliminate shadows. Framed work should be cropped to the edges of the frame.
• You need to start with a high resolution photo—that means shoot at as many pixels as you can set your camera for. Then resize to a smaller size. If you try to resize to a larger size the quality of your photo will be fuzzy and terrible. In other words, if you are resizing to 1200 pixels your original photo must be more than 1200 pixels on the longest side to begin with.
• Remember that the photos you provide for the tour registration will be used online, in advertising and printed in the catalog. They represent you to the public, so be sure they do you credit! If you enter a lot of shows and/or don't want to spend your time fussing with photos consider having a professional take your photos.
• Remember to rename your photo, using the naming system or label the registration asks for before you send it.

I hope these digital tools are helpful. I have been using the resizer on my iPad a lot lately, and find it really handy.

Happy resizing!
Terry

Posted with Blogsy

Open Studio Stories: Connecting and inspiring teachers, students, bikers and world travelers.

A visitor from Japan showed up at Christine Martell's studio door.  Miki Yamashita was visiting Portland for the SIETAR-USA(Society of Intercultural Education Training and Research) conference.  "She noticed my posts on Facebook about the studio tour.  She arrived before the conference started and came to my place to try out gelli printing and purchased a painting," said Christine.

The pictures show Miki doing gelli printing with acrylic paint.  According to Christine, "The one she is holding is watercolor with ink and colored pencil on paper. The ones in the background are acrylic gelli print collages on panels."

Tim Gabriel's most memorable Open Studio story started with a phone call from a mother looking for help with a home school history lesson.  "She asked if I was a real blacksmith and if she could bring her sons to my studio to watch me work.  I told her to come by my open studio," said Tim.  He not only talked about the history of blacksmith and forged a leaf, Tim gave it to the boys as lesson learned.

"She arrived out of breath at my studio door asking, Is this the open studio? Are you the artist?"  According to Darla Boljat, the woman had been riding her bicycle through Sherwood when she saw the Washington County Open Studios signs and followed them to the artists' studio.  The winded visitor enjoyed her tour so much, she is now taking classes at Darla's studio.

Terry Grant told about a couple who arrived at her studio wanting to take photos.  It was no problem, she assured them. After his wife went upstairs to look around the man said, "My wife is an artist, but she has been very ill for the past year and has not been able to do much. She misses it.  She goes in for surgery next week and will be recovering for awhile.  I wanted to bring her out to see the studios today and she can enjoy the photos as she recovers and be inspired to create when she is well again."

Artist Lynn Adamo and a visitor connected over a love for the artist, Morandi.  This artist inspired Lynn to create a mosaic piece which she saw the visitor admiring.  After they talked about Morandi,  the visitor purchased the piece bringing together inspirations from two artists' work  she admired into her own life.

An expected class reunion happened at Ana Quinn's studio.  On the tour weekend,  four  of her classmates from Hudson's Bay High School in Vancouver, Washington showed up at her studio!

Bringing together artists and visitors from around the block and around the world.  Inspiring imaginations, teaching lessons, connecting and re-connecting artists with the people who love art.

That's the magic of the Washington County Open Studios Tour.

To find out more about being an artist or visitor for our 2015 tour, check out our website at www.washcoart.org

In Memory: Karen French

I met Karen at my first Oregon Potters Association meeting where she was the Hospitality Coordinator.  Her job was to set up tables for treats but she went above and beyond.  With her open, up front and easy going humor, she instantly made me feel welcome and at ease in this new group.

Thanks to Washington County Open Studios, I got to know her even better.  Doing her Artist Profile (here), I learned about Karen’s clay journey from “sanity” classes when her children were small in Corvallis to teaching at the OSU craft art center to selling her work at craft fairs, Ceramic Showcase and becoming one of our valued open studio tour artists.

As part of our tour committee, Karen volunteered to help me with public relations.  I had pages and pages of excel documents that needed updating and consolidating as well as help with online event/calendar listings.  It didn’t faze Karen at all.  True to her nature, she jumped in with both feet editing and reorganizing and getting all the event postings done with ease.  In addition to our group, Karen was a very busy volunteer with her Bethel Congregational UCC, Altrusa International, and the Oregon Potters Association.

But Karen was more than just a committee member to me.  She became my friend.  A clay and play buddy.  An advisor and coworker to talk with about glaze problems, clay tricks and share new ideas.  She lent me her terra sig to paint on my greenware to prepare for doing horsehair raku at her studio.  The day came to fire and raku with hail, lightening and pouring rain.  We thought we’d have to postpone, but in Karen’s go-for-it style, we decided to do it anyway.  I wrote all about it (here).  But suffice it to say, it was a great time.  We got some wonderful new raku pieces.

 

I was so inspired, I used the experience to pitch and get a local TV station to shoot live segments from Karen’s studio about our 2014 tour.  It took a lot of work to set up for the TV shoot, but Karen just rolled up her sleeves and pitched right in even though she’d just recovered from back surgery a few months earlier.  During her open studio weekend, she had a great time with her visitors and also made sure to send her visitors onto the other artists’ open studios nearby.

 

Many people come and go in our lives.  But some come into our lives, help us see life in a different light and leave us far too suddenly and too soon.  Karen was one of those people to me.  I was deeply saddened and shocked to hear of Karen’s death on December 11, 2014 from an unexpected and sudden illness. 

Her memorial service will be held January 3, 2015 at 1:30pm at Bethel Congregational UCC, 5150 SW Watson Avenue in Beaverton, Oregon. 

Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Karen went to high school in Trafalgar Castle school and attended George Brown College.  As she wished, her ashes will be scattered at her most favorite spot, Windswept, the family island and cottage at the north end of Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada. For Karen, Windswept has always been a place of nature, family and peace. 

Rest in peace, my friend, we will miss you.