Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day! Years ago, the scenic beauty of Bucks County inspired those famous lyrics in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! The song was written amid the natural wonders of this historically artistic area. Today, the song and beautiful Bucks County itself continue to unite and inspire a whole new generation of contemporary artists and art lovers. Another line from the song (The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye) served as the source for the name of a growing artists’ studio tour in the region: the Elephant’s Eye Artist Studio Tour, a free, self-paced, self-guided driving tour that leads the art lover to the studios of contemporary artists living and working in Bucks County. This year’s third annual studio tour will take place on the weekends of May 15-16 and May 22-23.
“The name gets people talking,” says Lisa Naples, the ceramic sculptor who founded the tour in 2008. “I wanted to acknowledge and refer back to the group of artists from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s—and to the legacy of the geniuses of Pearl S. Buck and the Pennsylvania Impressionists—who were all ‘speaking in their own voices’ at that time.” It was Naples’s husband, Andy Cleff, who suggested the name, drawing from the famous song’s lyrics, and it seemed fitting.
Naples had thought about organizing a Bucks County studio tour ten years ago, but only sat down to flesh out the idea on paper about seven years later. This year, the 3rd Annual Elephant’s Eye Bucks County Artist Studio Tour (http://www.elephantseyetour.org/) will feature some of the area’s finest contemporary artists and their studios, allowing the public to see both the work of nationally and internationally acclaimed artists working in 2-D and 3-D—in a variety of media—and the environments in which they create. The hours for the free tour will be Saturdays from 10-6 and Sundays from 11-5.
“The tour always features ten studios, on a rotational basis, so there are always several different artists from one year to the next,” says Naples, “but artists working in contemporary art are always re-inventing themselves.” Naples exemplifies this, for as a nationally recognized ceramic artist, who currently has work exhibited in the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, she has focused on functional pottery, on garden objects, and more recently, on narrative, figurative sculpture.
“Most of the artists make their living from art,” says Naples. “They are chosen for their excellent work; the art work is juried; there’s a definite standard of work required.” However, the featured artists are not only chosen for the quality of their work, but “. . . [they] must have a studio and a great building, with enough parking,” says Naples.
“Artists [usually] work in isolation,” says Naples, who has chosen six artists to be featured again this year and, thus, to share their creations and their creative processes as they interact with the public. Featured returning artists this year include: Alex Cohen, whose realist paintings hone in on moments of mystery and fuse the real and the invented; David and Wendy Ellsworth, internationally known for their beaded sculpture/jewelry and hollow vessel wood turnings, respectively; Stacie Speer Scott, who in her hilltop studio creates paintings and collages that combine found objects, ephemora and fabrics; husband and wife Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee, internationally known photographers whose photographs are collected in over 140 museums worldwide and who are not only the publishers at Lodima Press but who self-designed their home/studio—reached by fording a stream—down to the door handles; Ken Vavrek, a member of the Philadelphia Sculptors group and an artist who creates abstract artwork in glazed stoneware and wall platters, glazed with geometric imagery related to the sculptures; and Naples herself.
The four new studios joining the tour this year are those of Linda Guenste and Jonathan Hertzel, who have their studio in a stone farmhouse and create painting and sculpture that explores the human condition and examines life with a contemporary eye; Pat Martin, an abstract artist who works with oil to create layered veils of color, rich textures, and gestural lines in her paintings and creates abstract drawings and collage; John McDevitt, a steel sculptor whose work is displayed both outdoors and in the sculpture gallery of his Phillip’s Mill Award Winning artist’s studio; and Louis Pruitt, who has been creating sculpture in a Bucks County dairy barn for fourteen years after retiring to the area from SoHo and Williamsburg in New York.
Naples encourages new artists and focuses on bringing people and art closer together. “Getting started [as an artist] in my late teens, I had no role models to allow me to see art as an option, as something I could create a world around,” says Naples, and it wasn’t until she had finished college that she realized that this was possible.
As a result of her experience, when developing the studio tour, she found it seemed “natural” to include an “educational piece”, and each year’s tour is now preceded by an Educational Outreach Program, where ten artists’ studios host students arriving on field trips, provide art lectures and demonstrations, and enable the students to engage in one-on-one discussions with the artists. In 2008, seventy-five students visited the art studios on that educational day. This year, two hundred and fifty are scheduled to attend on Friday, May 14—from twelve local schools. John McDevitt, one of the featured artists this year, is now managing the educational component of the Elephant’s Eye Studio Tour. “It’s thrilling [for me], as the organizer, to see that people are coming on board [to help out]”, says Naples, and she and McDevitt hope to see the number of children benefitting from this yearly event increase by about fifty percent.
“The tour really brings people to the work of new artists [as well],” says Naples, who, keeping with her commitment to encourage new artists, also invites visiting artists to participate in the tour. There are five of them this year: Annelies van Dommelen, who works mostly in oils, watercolors, and monotypes; Gloria Kosco, a ceramic artist who, for a while, studied at the Moravian Pottery and Tileworks in Doylestown; Holli Hollingsworth, who receives artistic inspiration from landscapes, which the artist says remind us of who we are in the inner and outer worlds; Jo-Ann Maynard, whose images focus on exploring the visual and conceptual complexities of the female figure, sometimes celebrating beauty, sometimes expressing a social or political connection; and Shellie Jacobson, whose current work explores cylindrical, textured forms enhanced by layers of stains and glazes.
The visiting crowds benefit from the tour, and so do the artists. “My husband and I have met some very interesting people that we probably wouldn’t have met otherwise,” says Chamlee. “And we’ve met many new artists, some who’ve become good friends.” Chamlee is well aware of how artists inspire one other.
“Of course, we always hope there will be some sales,” says Chamlee, “but we aren’t counting on that. That’s not why we participate in the tour. Rather, it’s to meet all these good people, . . . and we all reap such benefits from each other. It’s just a very rich experience.”
Naples says that people find it hard to believe the tour only started a few years ago. She credits her husband with helping her tremendously with the management of all the details involved in organizing the tour, and says people have repeatedly said, surprised, “This is only your third year! It seems like the [tour’s already] an institution.” And she says people have expressed appreciation for the good discernment used in choosing the artists and for there being no admission fee. But the fact that several high-functioning autistic elementary students attended an educational program and at first disliked the “dirty work” only to become fully engrossed in the artistic experience is what Naples considers some of the best “feedback” she has received.
The tour route, which takes an hour and a half to drive even without stopping anywhere, leads the visitor through Central and Upper Bucks County to studios in many locations—to a hilltop, to a landlocked property across a stream—and to many types of buildings—a farmhouse, a dairy barn, even converted industrial buildings. Moreover, several demonstrations are planned during the event. For instance, Ken Vavrek will be demonstrating “Press Molding a Platter” daily at 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m., and John McDevitt and Lisa Naples will be providing on-going demonstrations of their work.
“There’s no reason why this tour shouldn’t be able to grow,” says Naples. She would like to see the size of the tour—the number of studios—remain small but the knowledge of the tour’s existence move onto the national scene. To help the event grow and to make it easier for small businesses to help with future tax-deductible contributions, she has acquired 501(c)(3) status for the tour. She hopes that eventually adequate funds will be available to offset more of the tour’s operational costs and for such additional things as identifiable tour banners at each studio and financial assistance to cover the bus rental fees required for the student field trips.
“The tour is valuable for people because it lets them see the artists at work—it makes it all visible,” says Naples. Bucks County, replete with its many nice Bed & Breakfasts, good restaurants, and scenic landscapes, and with its Elephant’s Eye Studio Tour, offers not only the possibility of a beautiful day but perhaps a beautiful, art-filled weekend—or two.
© 2010 by Catherine J. Barrier. All rights reserved.
