Artists open their studios for eighth annual tour

The Sisters Arts Association's (SAA) eighth annual Artist Studio Tour is this Saturday and Sunday, September 21-22, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.

Art enthusiasts can hop in the car or on the bike and head out to some of the studios in and around Sisters. A little exploring will lead from wood carving to printmaking and bronze sculpture, from glass lace to rainbow-colored fish, and pastels to pottery.

Photo by Helen Schmidling

Susie Zeitner with some "Glass Lace."

Just beyond the Sisters Post Office at 281 Sun Ranch Dr. is Z Glass Act, the home studio of Susie Zeitner, a nationally popular art glass interior design specialist. Welcoming visitors, Zeitner will talk about her latest technique, turning glass into something that resembles lace or sea foam. Melting glass at a high temperature causes it to contract into a lace-like pattern. She researched the technique on Instagram and Pinterest and took a workshop from a landscape artist in Washington. Then, for 30 days, she created a different batch of "glass lace" each day. Her curiosity and hard work paid off when she was commissioned to create light fixtures that replicated ocean waves for a 10,000 sq. ft. house on the Oregon Coast.

Another of Zeitner's unique techniques is painting with light, a unique style of drawing and painting with glass powders and enamels combined with sheet glass. Using small screens, the powder is sifted in layers, sometimes fusing each layer separately. Glass enamel paints are applied over or under powder layers, then fused together in a final firing at temperatures ranging from 1,300 to 1,500 degrees.

Photo provided

Danae Bennett Miller in her studio.

Danae Bennett Miller's sculpture and printmaking studio is in Tumalo, a convenient stop for visitors heading to Sisters from Bend. She will show sculpture, and monoprints, both unframed and framed, under polyurethane.

Miller will demonstrate her unique wax process of sculpting. This wax texture process has been developed over 40 years, using different waxes at different temperatures. To begin, she pours a sheet of wax onto a large table, then cuts away the sections of wax until she finds the shape that's most desirable for the sculpture that she is creating. She places the wax shapes onto a taxidermy or other form, until the arrangement is complete, at which point it's disassembled and sent to the foundry where each piece is cast as bronze. Each small bronze section is sanded, welded, and patined to achieve the final form. Thus, each of her sculptures is one-of-a-kind.

When she is not creating art in her studio, Miller is a family rancher who raises grass-fed cattle in central Oregon and at a ranch property 40 miles from Burns. She also raises sheep and chickens. "I spend most of my time alone, either with my work or my animals. In fact, I am inspired by animals - their beauty and their relationships with us as people."

Master woodcarver J. Chester "Skip" Armstrong encourages visitors to make the pilgrimage to his studio off Edgington Road. It is home to a huge variety of inanimate animals in various stages of completion, as well as finished sculptures.

Armstrong is entirely self-taught. Before Mount St. Helens blew, he helped to run a YMCA camp at Spirit Lake, Washington. He wanted to introduce campers to Native American totem poles and masks but couldn't find anyone to teach the class. So, he taught himself to carve and to teach, and discovered a natural talent for shape and proportions. "I can see forms in raw logs. Just take away everything that doesn't look like nine horses running." For more than 40 years, Armstrong has worked with chainsaws, grinders, and chisels, to turn maple, pine, and walnut into eagles, ospreys, wolves, coyotes, otters, salmon, herons, and running horses. "It's the magic of life," he says. "It's what moves me.

"I will be showing a bumper crop of some of the best sculptures I've ever created. I haven't done my usual summer tour of shows and galleries; I am just working away out here, like projects for the High Desert Museum. This includes a 12-foot-tall snag for the kids' interpretive center that features great horned owls, raccoon families, bat caves, even mushrooms - all appropriate to the area." A new wall mural depicts five wolves running, soon to be delivered to Telluride. "I've played around with staining and dying the wood in shades that I'm really excited about," Armstrong said. "For me, it's a whole new angle on wood carving." In all, there are 20 to 25 great sculptures.

Steve Mathews will welcome visitors to his Tollgate studio and home that is a personal museum of art collected over a lifetime. After an early start as an illustrator, Mathews moved on to teaching art at the high school, community college, and college level. "If you teach high school art, you'd better be a master of all things creative," he says, so he obtained a master's from Lewis and Clark, and doctorate from Oregon State. His recent work is whimsical creatures (human and other) rendered on wood slabs with fine-line markers and colored pencil. His studio is at 69157 Lariat.

Reached by phone on Saturday night, sculptor and painter Gary Cooley was on his way home to Sisters from the bronze-casting foundry in Enterprise with two major pieces: an eagle with an American flag and a big blue heron. He will show these and other bronzes along with several recent paintings. His current work in progress is a sculpture of the Biblical figure of Ruth, gleaning wheat from the field of Boaz.

Potter Ken Merrill, pastel painter JoAnn Burgess, and oil painter Sandy Melchiori round out the list of artists who are a part of the Studio Tour outside of galleries on Hood Avenue. At Canyon Creek Pottery, Merrill has a wide selection of functional handmade pottery. Burgess paints her love of nature in vivid pastels. In her world, that is not an oxymoron. Melchiori is an oil painter and a landscape designer who paints big, bold canvases and boards with liberal brush strokes creating florals, farm scenes, and animals.

While these artists will be showing work in their home studios, nine other artists will be showing and demonstrating in four galleries on West Hood Avenue: Jennifer Hartwig, The Scratchboard Lady, will be at Sisters Gallery and Frame Shop; Don Zylius's watercolors, Henriette Heiny's abstract acrylics, and AJ Evansen's crystalline ceramics at Toriizaka Art; painters Dan Rickards and Garth Williams at The Rickards Gallery; and painters Reina Verhey, Taylor Manoles, Amelia Morton, and ceramics by Maren + Laura at Space in Common.

The Studio Tour is self-guided and free to all. You may arrange your visit in any order and spend as little or as much time as you like with each artist. Studio Tour Guides, with maps, are available in all of Sisters' Galleries, and at Paulina Springs Books, Sisters Movie House & Café, Sisters Coffee, and Fika. Take advantage of this opportunity to meet your favorite artists and to see what they do and how they do it.

Sisters Arts Association was formed in 2015 by local artists, volunteers, and others who believe that arts are an important part of a healthy community. SAA sponsors monthly Fourth Friday Artwalks through the galleries of Sisters, and advocates for public art, art education, and support of the arts. More information is available at http://www.sistersartsassociation.org.