Local Artists Open Up Their Studios and Turn Their Homes into Galleries

ORANGE SLICES

By Laurie Paolicelli

Check out local artist’s studios Saturday November 12, from 10:00 am to 5:00pm and Sunday, November 13, 2022 from Noon to 5:00 pm.

People – visitors to Orange County and residents alike – are fascinated with the idea of visiting homes not their own. We’re a curious people; we love to see how others live and work. That’s one reason the annual Orange County Artists Studio Tour is so popular – that and the love of art and the local artisans who make it. Mark your calendar for this weekend and drop into local home studios and see the brilliant work for sale and meet the artists themselves.

Painters, sculptors, writers, architects, composers: how do they do what they do? It’s a strange and compelling magic, and seeing where they work, and how they work, allows us to understand that process, to some degree. It definitely helps us appreciate it.

An artist’s studio has often doubled as a place to buy their art. Artists from as far back as the Baroque era figured this out. When Rembrandt’s career took off in Golden Age Amsterdam, the great Dutch painter moved to an expensive home with a well-lighted studio. He would paint his famous Night Watch here, among many other masterpieces. The artist lined the walls floor-to-ceiling with his paintings, and then invited potential patrons in to browse. Opening up the studio turned out to be good for business, so much so that Rembrandt also had a small office to keep up with his paperwork. (He wasn’t terribly good at it, and eventually went bankrupt.)

Now in its 28th year, the 2022 Orange County Artist’s Guild Studio Tour is back. The first weekend of the tour has passed, but you have one more weekend to enjoy it, November 12th and 13th. For many Orange County artists this event is the highlight of their working year. The opportunity to meet art-lovers from across the Triangle and beyond is a rare one. And studio visitors enjoy seeing the context and environment in which the work is made — how studios reflect the individual artist’s character and perspective. The tour is a celebration of the creativity and diversity of the arts in our area, a great experience for art lovers of all ages.

Samplings of Artist’s and their Work

• Hillsborough:
• Thomas Stevens Gallery art features local landscapes, colorful gardens, whimsical still life, and an alarming number of people who have lost their clothes.
• Mary Ann Peter Pottery features functional and decorative porcelain and stoneware with colorful nature inspired glazes.
• Lynn Burcher features whimsical, nature themed jewelry with hand-painted enamel, sculpted glass beads, and traditional metalwork.
• Crawford Horne Thistle Glen Pottery features functional stoneware pottery fired in his self-designed and constructed wood-fueled kiln.
• Avery Danziger Fine Art Services has collectable fine art photography. Artist’s photographs are in the permanent collection of MoMA-NYC, The Mint Museum, the Ackland Museum, and the Smithsonian.

Carrboro

• Peter Filene features painterly double-exposure photographs of people and art work (Paris, Prague, New York), plus photo collages.
• Linda Prager Designs features hand built functional and sculptural ceramics with layers of textures and colors. Mixed media work in acrylics. Unique art jewelry.
• Betsy Vaden: functional and fanciful clay works for the home and garden, inspired by nature and storytelling. Many firing techniques used.
• Mike Roig: metal sculpture, always moving one way or another.

Chapel Hill

• Peg Bachenheimer’s abstract paintings inspired by nature, memories, feelings and experiences in oil and encaustic, large and small.
• Steven Bachenheimer: hand sewn long stitch and Coptic-bound blank books suitable as journals, sketchbooks, and watercolor books.
• Savannah Scarborough: Wabi-sabi, the Japanese term describing an appreciation of the ingenious integrity of natural objects and processes, offers a lens for understanding a unique approach to clay.
• David L. Stickel: signature member of the American, National, Transparent, Southern, Watercolor USA Societies and Master status with the Watercolor Society of NC.

• Eduardo Lapetina: abstract acrylic paintings in a wide variety of sizes. Sensuous and turbulent surface textures in vibrant, varied colors.
• Emily Eve Weinstein: KRAMER/WEINSTEIN, Nature, cat, provocative, beautiful, eco-friendly, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Durham, great sky, major art, and design.
• Judith Ernst produces large, one-of-kind sculptural vessels that express the beauty of the natural world.

Whether you’re indulging in an artistic fantasy of sensuous and turbulent surface textures in vibrant colors, or to be inspired by being around paintings inspired by parks, gardens and natural environments, a trip to an artist’s home studio can be a memorable highlight of any trip to Orange County, North Carolina.

For directions, a map and full directory of participating artists, visit: https://www.ocagnc.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Laurie Paolicelli is the Executive Director of the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau.