Quite a bit has happened since my last post - the Manito Art League juried show has come and gone (and was beautiful....every year the art entered is so different from previous years!) as well as the first two weeks of my last classes as an instructor at Riverrun (which is strange to think about....I've gotten very attached to my students and will miss them greatly when I move). Most highly-anticipated of all, however, was the 2009 Northwoods Summer Art Tour, which took place this past weekend.
If you aren't familiar with the tour, the bare-bones description is that a large number of private studio artists and galleries around north-central Wisconsin participate in what might be called a three-day-open-house where they host guest artists, display new work, and offer demonstrations (some even invite the public to create small projects). At Riverrun, we hosted Betty Christian, a local jewelry artist, and Audrey Hood Hampton, a watercolorist, who created and sold their work in our upstairs gallery for the entire duration of the tour. In the downstairs studio, we worked on demonstrations of hand-building and carving in clay (which resulted in the first collaborative piece Joan and I have ever done together) and Joan also demonstrated various needle felting techniques. (I have various pictures from the tour posted below.)
On the last day of the tour I managed to take an hour during one of the quieter portions of the afternoon to go visit two other pottery studios in the area: Pigeon Road Pottery, owned by the fabulously-talented Amy Higgason , and Bear Paw Pottery, owned by also very-talented John and Vicky Langer. At Pigeon Road, Amy and her guest artist, Katelyn Koester (whom I've known since high school), had a small station set up for visitors to create small sculpted clay heads which will be fired and mounted in a round thrown frame for display at future tours (Amy did tiles with guests several years ago and had them mounted and displayed for this tour). I had time enough to make a small Minotaur-inspired addition before having to zip over to John and Vicky's, where they were just finishing unloading a raku firing. I had done an evening of raku with the Langers two years ago and they graciously invited me to come back to their house that evening after the tour was finished and everything settled at Riverrun to do another firing (again, images are posted below). Obviously and overall, the tour was a great experience...strange to believe it's over now!
Joan's and my collaberative piece...a Master/Apprentice canoe filled with sentimental and symbolic objects and carved with travel/future-related images.
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Joan said, "Hey, Kristen, why don't you carve a little something into the side of the canoe?"...that "little something" ended up taking five hours to complete and representing three world cultures
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We all started getting pretty goofy towards the end of the last day...I happened to capture one of Joan's better faces :).
John Langer moving my scorching-hot raku plate from the kiln into a paper-lined garbage can
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My piece along with some from John and Vicky (love the red!!)
For more information on the Northwoods Art Tours (there's also one in the fall) or the studios I mentioned in the blog, please follow these addresses:
http://www.northwoodsarttour.com
http://www.riverrunarts.com
http://pigeonroadpottery.blogspot.com
http://northwoodsarttour.com/bear paw.htm
Also, I have some very exciting news regarding this fall, but I'll keep that for my next posting. :)
