AMR (Andes – Margaretville – Roxbury) Open Studios Tour 2018 will take place Saturday and Sunday, July 28 – 29 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with close to thirty participating artists and artisans working in all disciplines – painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, ceramicists, furniture designers and textile artists. Located in a bucolic scenery, all studios will provide unique experiences for visitors to explore the area and learn directly from the artists.

Launched in 2012, AMR Open Art Studios Tour has grown into a major cultural attraction, as art tours have become more and more common all over the country. Studio visits trigger questions that aren’t often asked in formal settings such as galleries and museums, and allow for a more intimate interaction with the art work. As art historian George Philip LeBourdais eloquently articulated in a piece for Artsy magazine in August 2016 “The studio is where strange magic happens, as much for the artist’s imagination as for the public’s. It’s the conjuring place of new concepts, styles, or forms. Sometimes it even comes to be seen as sacred, a place where visitors become pilgrims to the altar of art.”

Participating artists this year include Adam Cohen, Amy Masters, Ted Sheridan, Alan Powell, Lisbeth Firmin, Ellen Wong, Peter Yamaoka, Gerda van Leeuwen, Frank Manzo, Helene Manzo, Tabitha Gilmore Barnes, Gary Mayer, Barbara Alyn, Oneida Hammond, Ken Hiratsuka, Roshan Houshmand, Agnes Freas, Esther de Jong, Lesley A. Powell, Rosamond Welchman, Robert Axelrod, Deborah Ruggerio, Gary Mead, Anthony Margiotta, Rebecca Andre, Patrice Lorenz, Sharon Suess and Gail Freund.

A good place to start the tour is the Wawaka Grange in Halcottsville. Several artists will be showing at this location, including painters Agnes Freas and Oneida Hammond, and photographer Rebecca Andre. Art in the Catskills will present and sell autographed books – “How Art Is Made: In the Catskills,” which features a host of Catskills creatives, including sculptor Brian Tolle and urban realist painter Lisbeth Firmin, will be offered at a discounted price.

Still in Halcottsville, ceramicist Rosamond Welchman, who has participated in the tour every year since it launched in 2012, will open her studio located at 266 Halcottsville Road. For forty years, Welchman taught mathematics and education at Brooklyn College. Since retiring and moving to the Catskills, she has returned to her earlier love of visual design and ceramics. Her professional interests in mathematics (especially geometry) and in teaching (especially problem-solving) have had a strong impact on her ceramic work as well. Welchman’s pottery is hand-built with an emphasis on surface texture, often with patterns influenced by her travels around the world. “Wherever I go, I look for new forms and textures,” she says. “This year I am particularly interested in architectural pieces made from cut slabs of clay fastened together,” she adds.

Painters Robert Axelrod and Sharon Suess will also open their studios in Halcottsville at 261 and respectively 239 Halcottsville Road.

In Arkville, painter and printmaker Amy Masters, and architect and printmaker Ted Sheridan will open their studios located at 222 Chris Long Road. Over the past two years Masters has had a prolific time producing a new host of works: etchings and colorgraphs, as well as paintings from her summers spent in Maine. The artist is inspired by the natural world and the actual objects and vistas around her studio in the Catskills, but what she mostly likes about her work is re-arranging and re-envisioning the landscape in the abstract. One can see in her recent paintings a slight departure in color and texture compared to previous works.

Masters’ husband, Sheridan will be showing new works on paper using iron and iron oxides in addition to drawings and watercolors. A few years ago, Sheridan began experimenting with metallic compounds, corrosion, and magnetic fields to create original patterns of rust on paper. Coming from the world of architecture where everything is controlled and precise, in recent years Sheridan sat to explore the randomness of the oxidation process in metallic prints, and gradually began working on more and more elaborate projects.

Painter Anthony Margiotta will be showing at his studio located at 355 Route 3 in Halcott Center, while multi-media artist Alan Powell and painter Lesley A. Powell will be showing at their studios located at 993 Main Street in Fleischmanns.

“The canvas is now my stage,” says multi-disciplinary artist Lesley A. Powell. Since childhood, Powell has been attracted to non-verbal means of artistic expression whether be dancing or painting. As a choreographer, her interest revolves around the dancer’s ability to change the performance space, working under the influence of German expressionist dancer Rudolf Laban. Over her decade-long career, Powell has produced numerous shows for whom she designed anything from costumes to posters, brochures, and playbills.

As a visual artist, Powell focuses on human anatomy and body movement to depict either dance or circus scenes as well as nudes. She is drawn however to a broad range of media and thematics. Watercolors are prone for still life because of the space required to do the work, she explains, whereas oil paintings allow for more creativity and give the artist more time for reflection and revision. The tone, the feeling and the expression, Powell adds, are also different in oil compared to watercolor. When working in watercolor, the artist uses a more subdued color palette given the spontaneity of the medium, whereas in oil she prefers bolder and richer colors.

In Margaretville, urban realist painter Lisbeth Firmin will open her studio in the Commons Building at 785 Main Street, and show recent works and works in progress. For over four decades Firmin’s work has been in hundreds of solo and group shows across the country and internationally. She was the cover artist for the 2008 spring issue of Epoch, Cornell University’s literary magazine, and was the featured artist in the 2008 summer issue of the Gettysburg Review. This summer Firmin is showing a new series of paintings and monotypes at Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA. “What’s happening these days is that I see something about the light on a figure, and this is what interests me,” she says. She insists that her work is not about the colors, but about the light and shadow in the composition, apparent in works such as Fifth Avenue (1995), and Woman on a Train (2014). Firmin is one of the artists featured in “How Art Is Made: In the Catskills” book by this author.

Still in Margaretville, poet and furniture designer Gary Mead will open his studio and gallery located at 1289 South Side Road, painter Barbara Alyn will open her studio at 806 Main Street, and painter Patrice Lorenz will open her studio at 359 East Hubbell Hill Road.

In Andes, participating artists include sculptor Ken Hiratsuka, who will open his barn at 34325 State Hwy 28, and painter Roshan Houshmand whose studio is located at 495 Main Street.

The largest group of participating artists this year is in Roxbury: painters Ellen Wong, Adam Cohen, Helene Manzo, Esther de Jong, Gail Freund and Deborah Ruggerio, ceramicists and printmakers Peter Yamaoka and Gerda Van Leeuwen, photographer Frank Manzo, and textile artist Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes, will all open their creative spaces and engage in dialogue with visitors who often enough are artists themselves. One might dedicate one of the two days to visiting Roxbury’s studios only as driving from one place to another can take a bit of time.

Poet and painter Esther De Jong, a former fashion model, will be showing her pencil drawings and Catskill landscape oil paintings while working on a new large figurative work during the open studio; visitors can watch her paint and ask questions. De Jong, who is formally trained at the National Academy of Art and Design, co-founded by Thomas Cole in 1825, refers to her paintings as “lyrical images,” reflections of her poetry. De Jong’s studio is located at 50 Maple Lane in Roxbury.

Abstract painter Adam Cohen, known for works such as Intuition (2015), a finalist in the Art Olympia International Competition in Tokyo, Japan, and Mystic Marsh (2014), shown at the Morren Galleries in Amsterdam, Netherlands, is an intuitive painter whose style has been defined as Gestural Abstraction; his paintings are very much sculptural, and have a visceral look and the kind of inexhaustibility that the artist strives to achieve in his work. Cohen is currently working on a new series of paintings as many of his works have sold out in various galleries. He was recently featured in a solo show at Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art Gallery in Seattle. Cohen is one of the artists featured in “How Art Is Made: In the Catskills” book by this author. His studio, located in Roxbury’s Historic District at 53856 State Hwy 30, will give visitors a glimpse into the creative process and the naissance of new works of art.

Still in the Historic District, painter Deborah Ruggerio will open her studio located at 54096 State Hwy 30 for the first time this year. “Through a variety of media and techniques I hope to encourage the viewer to look a little more closely at nature’s intricate beauty at different times of the day, changing with the seasons to experience and savor the essence and beauty in nature,” she says. “Whether it’s in the solidarity of a rock formation or in the delicacy of the flower petals that bloom in the spring for only a short period of time, there’s a magnificent canvas to experience every day. All one has to do is take the time to look, see and experience,” she adds.

Mixed media artist Gail Freund will also be showing at 54096 State Hwy 30.

Across the street, at 54091 State Hwy 30, painter Helene K. Manzo and architect and photographer Frank Manzo will open their studios and show works produced over the past year.

Landscape painter Ellen Wong will open her studio located at 121 Shephard Lane in Roxbury. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Wong discovered in time that what she really wanted to do was landscape painting: “I noticed that every time I went somewhere I always brought with me my watercolors, and I always sketched where I was; somehow that’s how I got to understand, absorb or take in a new environment – I felt very sensitive to place,” she says. The recipient of many grants and fellowships, including the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program, as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Wong studied in the Art Department at Brooklyn College with Philip Pearlstein, known for reviving realist figurative painting in the 1960s. Pearlstein’s departure from Abstract Expressionism back then made him a renegade in the art world. It’s that kind of artistic sensibility and daring attitude that Wong had learned from Pearlstein. She has been painting the Catskills since the 1970s when she opened her studio in Roxbury.

Ceramicists and printmakers Peter Yamaoka and Gerda Van Leeuwen met in a Boston airport in the early 1980s as they were both traveling to and from Provincetown. They married three years later. Yamaoka studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, while Van Leeuwen received a degree in art from the University of Utrecht in her native Netherlands. In college both artists studied painting, but later on they switched to printmaking. Since moving to the Catskills in the early 1990s both artists became ceramicists: Yamaoka prefers voluminous mythology-inspired vases, while Van Leeuwen makes small porcelains inspired by animal life. Both Yamaoka and Van Leeuwen work and teach in a fully equipped ceramics studio in Roxbury, while exhibiting extensively throughout the Catskills and New York City. Van Leeuwen’s latest show “Diamonds & Rust,” which includes recent works produced over the past winter, is on view at Longyear Gallery in Margaretville through August 6. Both Yamaoka and Van Leeuwen are featured in “How Art Is Made: In the Catskills” book by this author. Their studios are located at 777 Carroll Hinkley Road.

Also featured in “How Art Is Made: In the Catskills,” textile artist Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes will open her studio located at 424 Carr George Road in Denver, an idyllic hamlet of Roxbury. Trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and the Center for Tapestry Arts in New York City, Gilmore-Barnes designs both functional and aesthetic products using traditional American patterns. Her work can be seen in museums and gallery exhibits, and at various arts and crafts fairs throughout the region. “Weaving is one of the oldest forms of a blend of art and function. The techniques of twisting fibers to make them stronger and durable started out probably in the earliest times of mankind history. From those twisted fibers men and women learned to do basketry, learned to create fabric, and also to use it for decoration.”

For maps and more information, visit http://www.amropenstudios.org/ and www.facebook.com/amropenstudios/.

The AMR – Andes, Roxbury, Margaretville – Open Studios Tour 2018 is funded by the Delaware County Department of Economic Development – Tourism Advisory Board and The Lindsay A. and Olive B. O’Connor Foundation, and by the 29 participating artists and their 35+ community business sponsors. Additional community support from the Longyear Gallery (Margaretville) and the MARK Project (Arkville).

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© 2018 Simona David