Art

Revealing the Creative Process

West Bay Open Studios returns for its sixth year

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The work of artists can often seem shrouded in mystery. Even when a painter, sculptor or photographer has a studio that’s open to the public, their work often takes place away from prying eyes. Not only is quiet and focus essential to the creative process, but artists tend to be solitary creatures.

The annual West Bay Open Studios Tour pulls back the veil surrounding the creative process each fall, when about 20 artists in North Kingstown, East Greenwich, Exeter and Warwick open their studios and homes to the public as part of a two-day tour that includes art demonstrations and discussions.

Now in its sixth year, the free event boasts bright gold signs to guide art lovers from location to location. Studios are spread out from Conimicut to Saunderstown, making it difficult to hit them all in one day, so people typically do a few on each day or even visit some artists one year and others the next.


Fused-glass artist Alice Benvie Gebhart has been involved in the tour since it’s inception, and typically gets about 100 visitors to her Post Road studio over the course of the weekend. “Bringing the public into the artist’s studio is a way of showing how much work goes into creating a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork,” she says.

Most of the artists lay out food and drinks for guests; some even have musicians playing. It’s also an opportunity to give back to the community: several participants donate a portion of the proceeds from Open Studios sales to local charities such as the Greenwich Odeum, for example.

The Open Studios lineup varies from year to year but invariably features stalwarts like Gebhart, painters Marjorie Ball and Nancy Gaucher-Thomas, and calligrapher Jane Parillo Rollins, all co-founders of the event. “I teach, as do many of the other artists, so I’ll pull out my pens and paper and let people do some experimenting,” says Parillo, whose Scribe studio is located on Main Street in East Greenwich. “I’m always looking for ways to perpetuate what has become sort of a lost art form, so this is an opportunity to keep calligraphy alive and demonstrate what it means to do this by hand.”

Other participants include printmakers, sculptors, potters, photographers, tapestry makers and mixed-media artists. Newcomers for 2014 include North Kingstown’s Mark Knapp, who makes fine bowls, cups and vases from segmented wood; and his partner, Donato Beauchaine, a painter who works in oil and watercolors and focuses on still-life and landscapes. Each will invite the public into their studios – Donato’s is in the house on Prospect Street, Mark’s in the garage.

“I just want to spread the word about woodturning,” which involves assembling hundreds of small pieces of different colored and species of wood before finishing on a lathe, says Mark. “This is very solitary work, and typically I’ll complete a project and it just ends up on a shelf. Seeing the end product, you can have a hard time visualizing how it all comes together. So I plan to put some things on the lathe and demonstrate how I do it.”

Hard work? Yes, but the artist’s studio is where the magic happens, too. So come into our local artists’s spaces on Open Studios weekend, and perhaps you’ll bring some of their art back to yours, as well.

West Bay Open Studios | October 25-26, 11am-5pm

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