Fall Colors Art Studio Tour

FALL COLORS ART STUDIO TOUR

The Fall Colors Art Studio Tour is presented by the Fall Colors Art Studio Tour Committee
and supported in part by the Rapid City Arts Council.

FALL COLORS ART STUDIO TOUR
Presented by the Fall Colors Art Studio Tour Committee

Saturday, September 21 | 10am - 6pm
Sunday, September 22 | 10am - 4pm

Fall Colors Art Studio Tour is a free self-guided tour that will enhance your awareness of talented local artists while enriching the cultural life in the Black Hills. This juried art event, offers a unique opportunity for artists to gain further recognition, open their studio doors to the public, and to show and sell their work.

Fall Colors Art Studio Tour fosters a greater understanding of the artistic process by providing the public with a unique opportunity to enter the world of the visual artist and experience how, why and where art is created.

For more information, please contact:
Mark Zimmerman green.ink.mark@gmail.com or 605.342.2552

About the Artists

Jim Green

Since life for me has always been about being in and around the outdoors, my primary goal is to celebrate nature through telling the inspiring stories of the creatures that share our world—and to tell these stories through my art. I believe that people often care about what they see every day, such as their back-yard birds. Chickadees, Goldfinches, or Cardinals. I like sculpting those birds, as well as the less accessible birds that have a conservative concern, because they’re beautiful, they make me laugh, and they start a conversation. A conversation that might lead to a broader understanding of the world around us.
I also choose subjects based on the characteristics of my medium. As a former fine-art foundry owner and all-around foundry-man, I love working with bronze. Its elegance and endurance are evident in sculptures from the smallest, whimsical hummingbird to a fifty-foot horse and rider. When working with bronze, I want the metal to be visible and to contribute its essence to the piece.
My sculptures, though detailed, are not anatomical studies; they are interpretations highlighting the elements that speak to the animal’s characteristics. I research the details that set them apart, and the personalities that make them who they are—the difference between an Eastern Screech Owl and a Barred Owl—so I can make them identifiable and engaging.
Sculpting keeps me in the larger dialog, in the mix, in the energy of the life that is around us every day. And I believe that knowing about something, and really understanding it, helps me to share it with others.

Bonnie Halsey-Dutton

Throughout human history physical objects have been lost and later found. This rediscovery of the past has been a constant thread in my art. I utilize trade beads as a metaphor for humankind’s cultural interconnection as I examine concepts of barter and global interaction over time. The relative permanence of trade beads allows many to survive as testament to humankind’s complex terrestrial navigation and interaction.

Relationships between cultures can create conflict, but interaction can also foster learning and exert a positive role. Through painting, I use movement and a bright color palette with the intent to convey a positive message. Today’s evolving technology is an example of ongoing cultural exchange and economic barter that is forging new territory outside of physical and real-time limitations. Through increasingly complex global interdependence, cultures and national economies have become intricately intertwined. Physical objects along with humans themselves continuously circumnavigate the earth creating countless new connections.

Deborah Mitchell

The beauty of landscape has always been a source of inspiration in my art, whether in the American West or as I move through ancient cultures. I look for inspiration in the “lived” environment. The evidence of the marks we make on the land, worn steps, tilled fields, and peeling paint speak to me.
My eye searches for the effects of light and time in both the built environment and the natural world. As a result, my art spans traditional approaches from depicting the landscape in graphite to monotypes of patterns and vibrant color.
This summer I will be studying with a master printmaker in Spain. I plan on pulling an edition of prints from this time during the Fall Colors Studio Tour.

Sandra Peterson

I am part of the Dahl Pottery group, working primarily with hand carved pottery and sculpture

Barbara Rowe

The Black Hills area provides endless opportunity to field explore, learn, and feel visual images of geological events and ancient living forms that unfolded throughout billions of years. Hiking and exploration encourage me to approach the natural environment with curiosity and a sensitive awareness, and if all aligns, artwork concepts are conceived.

It is challenging to view nature’s functional design for life and creatively interpret evolvement with colors, textures, and forms. The smallest nuances of nature influence my artwork including the iridescence of ancient ammonites, light dancing on faces of crystalline minerals, and rock formations freely sculpted throughout geologic time. These visual perceptions result in artworks based on the strength of nature’s designs.

To this end, I collaborate with science to make art and invite viewers to experience each piece of artwork as an essence of discovery.

Yoko Tenyoh Sugawara

My art depicts human nature, capturing both strength and weakness that may co-exist in the same heart. The first step of my conceptual approach is to ask myself what facial expression and body language work the best to illustrate a certain human condition. I then sketch out the images, collect photo references, and make small preliminary models. My ceramic sculptures are hollow-built from the bottom upward. It takes about 10 days to sculpt one. When the finished piece is dry, I kiln-fire it extremely slowly to approximately 1830ºF (∆06). The once-fired piece is stained with metallic colorants and kiln-fired again to 2124ºF (∆2). The last step is coloring it with acrylic or oil paint. The entire process takes about 2 months.

Lynn Thorpe

I have been called a left-brained artist. And though not exactly intended as a compliment, I prefer to consider it a fairly accurate comment on my particular bent. My mind is focused on the ideas/concepts embedded in the relationships I see and experience in the world. My work lies in making these relationships compellingly visual and beautiful enough that you take time to study and experience them for yourself.
If an idea does not physically exist, I create a model; photograph it under studio lights; download the image to my computer and play with it in Photo Shop. I then work from the printed-out image to create the painting.
Color goes hand in hand with the idea. Mixing all the colors, at stepped intervals of value and intensity, before I start the painting, is another of my “left-brain” quirks. The drying time of the oils is retarded by adding oil of cloves, using a fatter medium, and storing my palette in an air-tight container between work sessions.

Ray Tysdal

Having photographed for over 60 years just about covers it...I specialize in black and white wildlife and landscape, both representational and abstract with a bit of color thrown in just to complicate the issue.

Mary Wipf

Mary’s artworks reflect an intense interest in botany and the intimate relationship she has with the natural surroundings of her Black Hills home. Intricacies of color and pattern inform her prints, drawings and marbled papers. Rich with biomorphic forms, her prints and drawings reveal a passion for things overlooked and/or fragile yet essential. Powerful, yet sensitive marks make these pieces expressive beyond their diminutive subjects. Natural and invented patterns echo the quiet pulse of small living things.

Mark Zimmerman

If you grew up in square rooms, in square houses, in square towns of square states, you might find a square, or perhaps more properly a grid, becoming an unavoidable form in your landscape paintings and an inescapable conceptual component in your view of a land, in your idea of home. The subject of my work today is place, the landscape of the northern high plains and recently the Black Hills, which I call home. I love these places and their great space.

Memories of place, the feel as much as the look, haunt my existence. String memories of multiple visions together, dump them on a canvas, and stir them into visual equivalents of place and memory and you’re close to my artistic process. This is coupled with an appreciation for the slant and refraction of light, colors reflected to the eye by land and sky, textures under foot and at hand, and the space, that fraught emptiness of these lands as felt, seen, remembered, and conceptualized. All of these interests, in varying and unpredictable combinations, provide the subject for my work.

It is also my hope that elements of form, individually and in concert, delight the eye, satisfy an innate sense for quality, sound rich chords recalling spaces and lands remembered and dreamt, real and archetypal, that the works engage the intellect and imagination and resonate in the heart of the viewer.