Ojai Studio Tour Provides a Fine Activity for an Autumn’s Day

As if commissioned by the muse, autumn arrived just in time for last weekend’s Ojai Studio Artists Tour, the yearly opportunity for the public to invade the private spaces where art happens. Under the dry and clear climatic conditions, ending the stifling quasi-tropical heat that made Southern Californians dream of migration to Oregon, one could see the allure of this God-kissed valley. You could imagine why people of artistic bent would be drawn here.

In short, the weather completed a picture of relative bliss. Even if levels of artistic integrity and vision wavered on the tour’s stops, the general spirit of creative goodwill was infectious.

Now having completed its 14th year, the tour also serves as a progress report on the evolution of the local art world. Two of the venerable mainstays of the tour were in absentia this year. Sadly, Horace Bristol, the famed photojournalist whose work chronicled history and far-flung cultures with a sharp eye and warm heart, died in August.

He is commemorated by a special exhibition at the Ojai Valley Museum, and a tribute in the Ojai Art Center, with the words “We’ll Miss You, Horace” flanking Donna Granata’s compassionate portrait of Bristol.

The 104-year-old Beatrice Wood, still around and kicking, is being feted with an expansive retrospective exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art this fall. But her showroom--normally a hot spot on the tour map--wasn’t on the schedule this year.

That’s not to say that Wood’s presence didn’t keep popping up on the tour. She tends to lurk around the Ojai art scene like a friendly overseer, a participant and an inspiring presence. A mask of her face stood out among the selection of ceramic pieces in the house-cum-gallery of Ronda La Rue, one of the newcomers to the tour this year. Wood could be found again, looking both beatific and sensual while lounging on a couch, in a photograph at Carole Topalian’s studio/house.

The element of Ojai’s art scene represented by the tour appears, at least from the outside, to be a very supportive infrastructure and one that takes care of its own--especially its revered elders. Otto Heino, the master ceramicist whose wife and longtime collaborator, Vivika, died two years ago, carries on in his rambling, verdant house/showroom called “The Pottery,” another must-see stop on the tour each year.

But there were the Heinos in their glory, represented in a large painting by Alice Matzkin, propped up outside her studio. It’s the most poignant of the portraits in Matzkin’s collection--an interpretation that may be informed by a knowledge of the Heinos’ significance in town.

Matzkin and her husband, Richard, have their own art activities, albeit in different directions. In their twin studios tucked away in upper Ojai, she paints her loose, kindly portraits while he creates figurative sculptures that often deal with the fleshy realities and mortality of older subjects. Matzkin’s big news this year was a commission to paint Chelsea Clinton’s portrait, presented at a lunch with Hillary Clinton.

One obvious rallying point of the Ojai arts is the gallery of painter Gayel Childress, on the road to Meiners Oaks. This has become an important art space in the area over the last few years. For the moment, Childress is showing her own nudes, combining gold leaf and black dripping lines, which supply a kind of abstract calligraphy atop the implied figures.

Seeing artists’ works in the more-or-less neutral space of a gallery is one thing. Going to the creative site is another, which makes the tour a unique and slightly voyeuristic experience. It’s well-nigh impossible to separate the artist from the art, and we’re encouraged to leap to conclusions and connections that don’t necessarily have to do with the art, proper.

Over at Christine Brennan’s terra cotta studio in Meiners Oaks, the dreamy sounds of Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball” album seemed to reflect the inherent dreaminess of the artist’s fantasy-like vignettes. Walk past the flowing cactus garden leading to sculptor Theodore Gall’s rugged studio and you got the impression of a quasi-desert artist at work, fulfilling a personal vision with a welding mask and a love of mythic creatures and fanciful designs.

Not far away, Don Lazo’s paintings were placed throughout his small but intricate two-story house, leading the visitor up and through and out into the backyard, where more paintings were shown next to the large tepee. At the end of the trek, you found the most impressive painting, “Grand Ave.,” hung unceremoniously on the garage door.

At the end of the line on the map was the reliable, retreat-like aura of Nancy Whitman’s house, nestled in a wooded, creekside idyll. For this one weekend a year, Whitman’s unabashedly Mattisse-ish, post-post-Impressionist paintings nearly consume the spacious Whitman abode.

Her studio overlooks a pond on the property, and the pink carpet through the house echoes the leanings of her palette. Considering her bounty of pink-suffused interior paintings, with nods to Bonnard, one seemed to detect the direct influence of the environment on the artist.

These are the kinds of secret links and insights that make this annual tour a treat, something beyond art appreciation for its own sake. On a clear, crisp autumn day, the Ojai Studio Artists Tour is a pleasant self-guided tour into the inner sanctum of artistic process, as well as into the varietal lay of Ojai’s real estate.

BE THERE

Ojai Studio Artists exhibition through October at the Ojai Arts Center, 113 S. Montgomery St.