Where to Purchase Guidebooks

People wishing to tour studios can buy a guidebook for $15. It admits two adults to any participating studio and is good both Saturday and Sunday. The guide identifies artists, shows artwork, and provides directions to each studio as well as information about various gorge locales.

Guides are on sale now through the event web site:
http://www.gorgeartistsopenstudios.com, from participating artists, or at the following Gorge arts supporters:

In Hood River

Columbia Center for the Arts, 215 Cascade Ave.

Waucoma Bookstore, 212 Oak St

Annz Panz, 315 Oak St.

In Washington

Sticks and Stones Company, 154 E. Jewett Blvd., White Salmon

Husum Highlands B&B, 70 Postgren Road, Husum

The Dalles & Mosier

Klindt’s Bookstore, 315 E. 2nd St, The Dalles

Good Harvest Market, 320 E. 2nd St., The Dalles

Good River Restaurant, Mosier

Some of the Participating Artists

Karen Watson – A one-time art student and a nurse for more than 20 years, she returned to her creative impulse at midlife. Her broken ribs have healed, but she has found no cure for the inspiration she gets from the Gorge. “I am constantly
considering the landscape and envisioning how I would go about
re-creating it, almost to the point of distraction,” she says.

Cathleen Rehfeld ( www.cathleenrehfeld.com ) — With a degree in fine arts, Rehfeld cut her chops in design work for publications in the U.S. and South America before turning her focus to fine art. She loves oils, for the flexibility they afford her. A 15-year-resident of the Gorge, Rehfeld loves the natural influences on her work. “The clouds are often a focal point in my paintings. I like clouds a lot,” she says. She knows now why people buy art, but at age 7, she simply wondered why the man who wanted to buy her prize-winning painting didn’t just make his own.

Stephen Datnoff ( www.datnoff.com ) — A Gorge resident since 1978, photographer Datnoff misses the simpler time before the area was discovered. Still, through the medium of film, he tries to express the world as he discovers it, and leaves interpretation to the viewer. People often find their way into his images, through their active engagement with the natural features of the Gorge.
American Flats ore Processing Plant, Virginia City, Nevada. Hand-tinted and graffiti-enhanced by Stephen Datnoff.

Elizabeth See – She would love to work in glass or painting, but for the moment finds herself totally immersed in clay. Originally from Leavenworth, Wash., she descends from a man who was run out of Ireland in the 19th century and kept running until he hit the Northwest and settled down. “I named my studio ‘Shaky Ground’ because I am surrounded by volcanoes,” See says. “Potters are often intrigued by volcanoes; they resemble incredible kiln meltdowns where landscapes are reshaped with heat and molten rock.”

Ken and Liza Jones — She came through the modeling world, he from painting (he still paints) to the craft of constructing gorgeous picture frames, then the resourceful art of salvaging good old wood and turning it into graceful new furniture. They escaped from San Francisco to the Gorge so they could raise a family. Life is good. The wood is better.

Joan Chase — After running the Heavy Water Light Show for the leading psychedelic bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Chase moved into video work and earned accolades at the Portland Film and Video Festival in 1979 and the Ohio Film
and Video festival in 1980. Advancing computer technology has allowed her to move into digital photo printing and computer animation. Drawn to the Gorge in 1984 by windsurfing, she moved permanently from Portland in 1999.

Peny Wallace ( www.asherarts.com ) — Wallace shares credit with her models for the intrigue in the finished lifecastings that she has composed for more than 20 years. A teacher in The Dalles, she says “lifecasting stops an expression, it invites the viewer to really look and to understand something about the human character. It captures a moment, the soul’s spirit, and holds it suspended in a casting of time.”

Elizabeth Anderson-Schock ( www.eawatercolor.com ) — Blown to the Gorge by windsurfing and a job airbrushing art onto windsurf boards, Anderson-Schock calls herself an impressionistic watercolorist. “I spend lots of time with my digital camera in the outdoors, composing my paintings,” she says. “I find the wind blowing the flowers to be my biggest inspiration.”

John Mayo ( www.johnmayodesign.com ) – After a Peace Corps stint in Uzbekistan, Mayo studied fine arts and industrial design. These days, he applies CAD software to help him shape templates for cut-steel plates that he then assembles in intersecting planes. The resulting sculptures, he says, are “manifestations of conceptual art.”

Joy Kloman ( www.joykloman.com ) — A former art professor at the University of Mississippi, Kloman moved to the Gorge when her husband took a new job here. She paints in acrylics, oils and watercolors, makes prints and draws, and loves to teach. Her art is in several major public collections, including The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla.

Wayne Cordrey ( www.sticksandstones.us ) — He and his wife, Katie, own Sticks & Stones Co. in White Salmon, which features Wayne’s handmade pine and maple furniture, along with the work of other regional artists. “It’s really the people here that influence me, through their love of casual living and appreciation for color,” he says. Cordrey loves to play the guitar, and says his dogs sometimes join him in song.

COME, LOOK, ASK QUESTIONS OF GORGE ARTISTS
IN OPEN STUDIOS TOUR -- JUST DON’T FEED THEM

Art fanciers taking part in the tour can expect to see all manner of creative expression, from all manner of artistic fauna.

Such as? Well, they’ll see an artist who broke her ribs dancing at an art festival, the former art director of a Mexico City newspaper who at age 7 refused to sell a prize-winning painting to an appreciative adult, a potter who draws inspiration from the volcanoes in sight of her studio.

Visitors may meet a couple who recycle old wood into elegant new furniture, a computer artist who got her start doing light shows for the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Santana, a high school art teacher who creates plaster casts of the human form, a former ski bum who once airbrushed windsurf boards and now uses watercolors to create landscapes and still life.

Art fanciers who stop at the right studio might meet a former Peace Corps volunteer who uses industrial design technology to create multi-planar steel and wood sculpture loaded with social comment, a graphite portraitist who draws inspiration from her recreation on the snow of the Cascades and the waves of the Columbia River, a photographer who dramatically captures the interplay of people and nature where the Columbia cleaves passage through the Cascades.

“I’m not famous and don't need to be,” says Carol Wild-Delano, one of 35 Gorge artists who will open their studios to visitors during the tour. “I'm satisfied -- to share with others little bits of the people I find to be really special.”

Like most of the other artists taking part in the open studios tour, Wild expresses a deep appreciation for life in the Gorge. She took a teaching job in White Salmon in 1980, and hasn’t looked back.

“I love where I live,” she says. “The outdoors is where I am renewed. The people I admire and draw seem to be tied to the land and call the Columbia River ‘home’. I guess I was meant to be here.”

Organizers of the tour have scheduled it for a weekend when weather typically shows the Gorge at its springtime finest. They expect that along the way the art tourists may enjoy the fruit blossoms, local wineries and small town atmosphere of the Gorge. Spending the night in a local hotel or B&B would allow a more leisurely trip and a chance to treat themselves to a wildflower hike between visiting art studios.