Artists across the Pontiac and beyond welcomed visitors into their creative spaces over the weekend to get a look “Beyond the Easel”, as the studio tour was named.
The three-day event marked the official return of Art Pontiac’s studio tour after its six-year hiatus, and put dozens of artists’ work on display at locations across the Ottawa Valley and as far as Kingston, Ont., and Low, Que.
On Friday evening, the organizers held an opening reception at the Stone School Gallery in Portage-du-Fort.
“Art is not confined to a canvas – or even to a single medium. It lives in sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography, printmaking, mixed media, and many other forms,” said Art Pontiac secretary treasurer Rhonda Morrisson.
“It also lives in the spaces where artists work, in the stories behind what they create, and in the conversations that happen when studio doors are opened to the public.”
Morrison said she was nervous but delighted to see the studio tour, a longtime staple in Pontiac’s artist community, finally come back to life.
“They’re big shoes to fill. I’m hoping people will be patient with us as it returns. But I’m so happy to see it’s still alive,” she told THE EQUITY. “I think if we all work together we can make [the Pontiac] a destination for people to come for arts and culture.”
She credited outgoing Art Pontiac president Keri-Anne Chyzewsky with having done the bulk of the work to bring back the tour.
“I thought we should really have whatever we can, even if it’s not a very large tour,” Chyzewsky told THE EQUITY. “It encourages cross-border tourism. It encourages people to see more about the region and understand that we have artists not just from Quebec, also from Ontario. [ . . . ] There are a lot of people that didn’t realize there were so many artists in the region.”
Morrison said in the past year that Chyzewsky has been president, Art Pontiac membership has doubled, and now sits at about 50 artists.
Among those participating in this year’s tour was longtime Portage-du-Fort artist Geraldine Classen. She’s been an artist in the community for 50 years, and was instrumental in securing the Stone School building as a gallery space for the Pontiac Artists’ Association (now Art Pontiac).
“It was pretty unique at that time,” she said of the studio tour when she first joined it many years ago. “We actually had a bus from the National Art Gallery come up the first year I was on the tour. It was an amazing experience to have people who really knew art suddenly here on your doorstep.”
She said while this new iteration of the tour is much smaller than its previous versions, she appreciates the effort to offer people a space to see artwork in real life.
“There are very few venues [these days]. That’s been superseded by people posting their work online. But that’s not the same as hands on. You’ve got to really enjoy the look and feel of the work in reality, rather than online.”
A half hour from Portage-du-Fort, artist Marie-Catherine Smith also opened her home to the public. She moved back to the region from Montreal about a year ago and has since become an Art Pontiac board member.
“I remember growing up, seeing it [advertised]. Now I get to be part of it,” she said. On display in her barn on Maryland Road was her own work – a mix of watercolour paintings, graphite renderings and oil paintings – as well as artwork created by her children, her brother, both her parents, and her grandfather.
“Anybody can do it. You don’t have to be a specific type of artist [to participate],” she said of the tour. “It’s connecting different artists with the community. I’ve had people from Cobden come over, and from Gatineau. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got stuff going on here in the Pontiac.’”
