Twenty-one studios, two weekends, one artistic route through the Gatineau Hills 

Tashi Farmilo

The Chelsea-Wakefield Studio Tour returned for a 38th year on September 26, when 21 artists and artisans in Chelsea and Wakefield opened their studios to the public over two fall weekends, giving visitors a free, self-guided look at the kilns, easels and workbenches where much of the Gatineau Hills' art is made.

Studios welcomed visitors from 10 am to 5 pm on September 26 and 27 and will do so again on October 3 and 4. The dates are set to coincide with the peak of the fall colours along the Gatineau River, and organizers say the tour typically draws more than 3,000 people onto the area's back roads over its two weekends.

The appeal is proximity. Rather than viewing finished work in a gallery, visitors can watch pieces in progress and talk directly with the people making them. This year's roster spans painting, sculpture, functional and decorative ceramics, jewellery, woodworking, photography, mosaic and glass, mixing longtime participants with studios new to the route.

In Chelsea, landscape painter Erin Thibault works from a light-filled studio overlooking the river, with the forest she loves all around her. Her landscapes, often painted from memory, carry a dreamlike atmosphere, and years spent in places as different as Arizona and the Gulf of Mexico still surface in her work. Largely self-taught, she took up painting in 2009 and has since studied with various artists, attended workshops in France and now leads workshops of her own in Chelsea.

Wakefield painter Eva Meyer, whose studio is on chemin Gendron, began far from any studio, with marker doodles she used to work through difficult emotions. A chance encounter with an art class turned that outlet into a passion for intuitive, colour-saturated painting. Her canvases render forests and mountains as bright, dreamlike abstractions, landscapes remembered more than observed. In her artist statement, Meyer writes that she hopes one day to teach painting to people recovering from life's hardships.

Potter Bhajan Cooke, who works from a studio on chemin des Alouettes in Wakefield, makes large vases whose carved surfaces carry birds, flowers and clouds in deep indigo. The imagery is her way of giving voice to the untold stories of the women in her maternal line. Cooke also produces everyday pieces such as teapots and rice bowls, and her artist statement describes a process that runs from the wheel to carving to a final electric firing, which she says still yields a surprise or two whenever she opens the kiln.

Mosaic artist Annie Laprise, based on chemin Nordet in La Pêche, came to her medium by accident about 20 years ago while resurfacing an old dining table with fragments of broken ceramic tile. Raised in Quebec's Lac-Saint-Jean region, she is largely self-taught, though she has studied through seminars with the French mosaic collective Passion-Mosaïque. Laprise paints and kiln-fires her own porcelain tiles before breaking them by hand and reassembling the pieces into sweeping Gatineau Hills landscapes built on contrasts of light and shadow. A single work can take her weeks or even months to complete.

The tour is supported by several local partners, including the Municipality of La Pêche, which takes in Wakefield, and the regional arts council Culture Outaouais. A free brochure lists every stop and links the studios into a self-guided circuit. Printed copies are available at participating businesses in Chelsea, Wakefield, Ottawa and Gatineau, and the brochure, an interactive map, newsletter subscription and the full list of artists can be found at tourcw.com. Visitors can sign up for the tour's newsletter at: www.tourcw.com.