SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Artists’ Welcome : Comparing creations to their creators’ abodes tempted art lovers on the annual Ojai studio tour.

Yellow flags, 21 of them to be exact, dotted the Ojai Valley last weekend, from the rugged outskirts past Upper Ojai to the flatlands of Meiners Oaks.

Art lovers, voyeurs and other curiosity seekers plunked down their $10 and carted themselves all over town, one eye on a tiny map, the other scanning for flags denoting the presence of an artist.

It was that time of year again: The Ojai Studio Artists tour allowed a steady stream of visitors to go directly to the creative source, to visit the normally solitary haunts of artists’ studios. If artists produce art in the proverbial woodwork, here was a chance to see said woodwork.

Studio tours can be valuable lessons for outsiders who want to meet the artist on his or her turf. In the case of the Ojai tour, it also serves to illustrate in a direct, firsthand way, why this coveted spread of landscape has become a haven for artists and other creative people.

It’s been said before, but this is an enlightened little valley of varied terrain and open spaces. Artists desiring rich subject matter or just a tranquil setting naturally gravitate here.

In the process of touring artists’ studios, it’s difficult to separate the art from the abode. One naturally draws parallels.

“The Lizard Lady,” ceramist Heather Young, creates her iridescent-surfaced ceramic pieces--vessels, often with lizard motifs--in her rustic, small house. It’s a house that you could imagine is surrounded by lizards. Nearby, Liela Kleiman works on alabaster sculptures and paintings in a large, well-lit, poolside studio.

Mick Reinman’s house, up by Thacher School, is a pleasantly rough-hewn variation on a theme of Spanish Revival style, with exposed wood beams and a studio equipped with a wood stove. Fittingly, his paintings deal with Western themes (bovine, panorama, cowfolk), and primitive figures in a muscular, figurative mode.

The house of renowned Ojai potters Vivika and Otto Heino is steeped in work ethic, with a tangible integration of life and art. Large kilns and tools sit outside the house, a long, low, dark structure that seems to melt into the thicket of vegetation engulfing it.

In the showroom are shelves full of intricate ceramic work that seem to have grown, literally, out of the home fires.

Gayel Childress’ paintings come out of the Cezanne/Matisse axis sometimes popular in Ojai (which is not to officially pronounce a regional style). Her fine new Ojai landscapes pulsate with a surrealistically reddened palette. By contrast, just up the driveway, Christine Brennan creates her small, charmed, whimsical pieces.

Winding your way up California 150, you arrive at Beatrice Wood’s home studio/gallery. The ninetysomething Wood serves as a kind of matron saint of the Ojai culture scene. Her picture--usually with her famously warm, sly grin--can be seen in other artists’ studios, a source of inspiration and civic pride. Who else in town had a direct link to Marcel Duchamp?

There she hovers in her Upper Ojai perch: lofty, quirky, sagacious, frankly salacious, and not at all unapproachable. A typically spry and lovely Wood held court on the couch as passersby admired and snickered at her ceramic tableaux, including “The Man Who Thought He Had Arrived,” in which a suited man is flanked by naked women.

Up the road yet farther, the last outpost on the tour was Nancy Whitman’s home and studio. In Whitman’s case, it’s especially informative to see from whence comes her work--idyllic still-lifes and Bonnard-like domestic scenes in pastel hues.

In a plush setting with a pond and a stone-encrusted house, Whitman showed her paintings throughout the two-story house, decorated in color schemes similar to her paintings. Upstairs, the passing voyeur can’t help but notice the titles in her bookcase--books on Matisse, Gauguin and Art Nouveau, among others.

Back down the valley, the darker-toned, more angst-ridden work of Alberta Fins might seem more at odds with her rural-appearing home.

Ruth Farnham paints fantastical visions verging on abstraction. In the living room of her Ojai home, the observer notes books on Bonnard and Henry Moore, and an album of Turkish folk music, all of which seem to cast new light on a folkish painting such as “Night of Few Large Stars.”

Work and home aren’t always intertwined, of course. Sharyn Robinson’s dizzy linear investigations and Audrey Saunders’ intricate weaving-like collages are created in spaces inside an industrial complex.

In the “barn” that is her studio, Karen Lewis paints large, nearly photo-realistic canvases whose subject matter appears to be taken from snapshots and group portraits.

Out Meiners Oaks way, Leslie Thompson creates her precisely designed black-and-white ceramic pieces in a casual house featuring a studio and monolithic kiln. The house, it is worth noting, is part Quonset hut.

Two blocks away, Virginia Hoadley showed her paintings, with a loose, free figurative touch in a house nestled in a rural setting with, well, nicely loose and free landscaping.

Assumptions about the effect of environment on an artist can sometimes be dangerous or misleading. But in the case of this studio tour, assumptions are irresistible.

Closing out the tour on a note of pluralistic absurdity were Kristine Grey’s sound-equipped sculptures, set up outside her stonewalled home. Her mythologically oriented busts are festooned with found objects and flamboyant treatments. Likewise, she has supplied each with a sound collage of found sounds and musical snippets, to illustrate such pieces as “Hermes in an LSD Flashback.”

On this tour, Grey was at one end of the spectrum, Whitman at the other, geographically and aesthetically speaking. To take the tour was to tour the wonderful little outpost that is Ojai herself, from one extreme to the other.

It was also to realize that rumors of any cohesive, concerted Ojai movement among local artists have been greatly exaggerated. These artists are bound by residency, not by style. They know a nice place when they find one.