Author: Terry Grant

Last week I paid a visit to the studio and home of painter Annie Salness. Her Cedar Mill home is warm and inviting with a great view across the valley and hills.  Annie greeted me and gave me a quick tour of the house, including their rooftop deck, before we got down to discussing her work and her studio. It was a perfect fall day and the views were grand in every direction.

Not many artists have a full size basketball court in their backyard! (Annie’s husband is a high school coach. )

Annie’s training and background are in biomedical illustration, a very precise and technical kind of art career that she set aside when her children were small. Recovering from a devastating stroke seven years ago, she turned to art once again, but art of a more personally fulfilling kind, painting the things she found beautiful and nourishing.  Her still life paintings of flowers and everyday items have a fresh, spontaneous energy. She finds a special satisfaction in having developed her own methods for painting glass objects to incorporate those elements of transparency and reflection and light into her compositions.   Here she shows me the paintings for her annual calendar, which will be for sale during the studio tour.

Visitors to her studio will get to see where she sets up her still life compositions and takes many photos, from slightly different angles.

Then she views the photos on her computer screen and crops and adjusts until she finds the shot she can use to paint from.

She’ll be doing demonstrations during the studio tour at 1 and 3.  This is Annie’s third year as part of the Washington County Artists Open Studios. She really enjoys sharing her studio and work and is looking forward to this year’s tour and hoping, as all of us are, for good weather!

To see more of Annie Salness’s work and find out about her classes and commissions, check out her website and blog:  http://anniesalness.com/

I went out to Hillsboro yesterday to the Affordable Art for Everyone show and the first person I saw was Patti Isaacs, one of the Washington County Studio Tour artists. I think Patti has been part of the tour for as long as I have and it was great to see her beautiful work yesterday—one of the downsides (maybe the only one) of being a part of the tour is that you don’t get to take the tour, so it’s been awhile since I’ve seen what Patti is doing.  In addition to her always beautiful painted silk work, she has a whole series of colorful paper works. I was especially enchanted by some block prints inspired by a trip to Japan.

The Affordable Art show was great! I got to see several old friends and meet some artists that were new to me. I really like shows where you can visit with the artists

I always think I should view art as a thing unto itself—its visual appeal, it’s deeper meaning and what feelings it inspires, but a part of me is also asking “Who made this? Why?” and “How.?”  The “how” is often the most mysterious. I’d love to visit Patti Isaacs’ studio and learn more about how she makes all those lovely things I saw yesterday.  I met a new-to-me artist yesterday who creates haunting, intriguing images on aluminum. He tried explaining how it was done, but I really wanted to see the process. I tried to talk him into participating in the studio tour next year—I think he’s interested.

Our studio tour is fast approaching.  Come on out October 21 and 22 and meet the artists and take that rare opportunity to get a view of where and why and how the art is made.  We’ll be ready!

I last took part in Open Studios 10 years ago. I loved it but the amount of work both before and after is incredible. As a full-time artist that also teaches and shows in 8 different galleries time is very important to me. So it was with much consideration and convincing of my amazing family that it was time to take part in this amazing event again. So much has changed in the last 10 years and I can’t wait to share all that I have learned with you all.

As a native Oregonian, I cannot separate my art from my love of the Pacific Northwest. The coast, mountains, and meadows, each infused with mysterious light and atmosphere, weave narratives into their settings. I am inspired to tell their stories with my paint and brush strokes. Inspiration comes so naturally here.

I attended the University of Oregon for a few years to establish a business foundation, then finished with a Fine Arts degree in Illustration from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I immediately took on an internship with Will Vinton Studios (now Laika Studio), and also began to focus on children’s book illustrations. But, true to the predictions of my professors, after a few years as an illustrator, my true passion as an oil painter prevailed, and I began my career as a full-time oil painter fifteen years ago. I was blessed with a nearly immediate collector base that found something in my work that resonated with them.

I love working on my personal projects for the galleries, as well as on commissioned paintings for clients, whether for private, corporate or civic displays. I show in eight galleries across the country.

On a typical day, you can find me working in my home studio or outside painting Plein-air in some beautiful location. I also teach oil painting and give seminars.

Last year, my wife, eleven-year-old daughter and I took the year off from “real life” to travel the world. We visited twenty-one countries and painted with over 500 inspiring children from various orphanages and schools as part of our cause, which we called Studio Everywhere. This year it is my goal to reflect on that trip and create works of art that celebrate that special chapter in our lives.

Thank you for this opportunity to share our adventures and explorations through my art. I look forward to meeting all of you. Please feel free to introduce yourselves.

Artist Statement and the thread that binds all my work
As a painter, the effects of light and atmosphere are what I remember about a location and what inspires me most. Light transforms the ordinary or even beautiful into the exceptional. My quest is to capture these fleeting moments and help people see things again through new eyes. 

I am fascinated with glass art! The process seems like magic. If I weren’t holding down the fort in my own studio this year, I think Bob Heath’s studio might be the first one I would visit, so it was nice to have the chance to ask him a few questions…

What do you have in store for visitors this fall during the Washington County Artists StudioTour?
We have a fun hands-on activity for visitors to our studio. We have on hand, some basic glassware, including simple water glasses, wine glasses and beer glasses. For a small fee, visitors can choose a glass then decorate it with vinyl stickers made with a wide variety of punches that we have on hand. Then they can take their glass to the sandblast cabinet and frost everything that isn’t covered by a sticker. After that the stickers can be removed to reveal a permanent design in the glass. In the past, we’ve had everyone from children to seniors give this a try and they all had fun and left with a treasured memento.

How did you get involved with art? Did it interest you growing up?
I’ve had a fascination with art glass for as long as I can remember, probably starting with the stained glass windows in the church I attended as a child. I also fondly remember the tree that my grandmother kept decorated with brightly colored bottles hanging from strings. Blown glass balls and intricate glass paper weights intrigued me as an adult. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I finally decided to try it myself and my wife and I enrolled in a stained glass class. I really loved the process and then I discovered glass fusing and the myriad possibilities that it held for different ways to manipulate glass and there was no looking back. The technical side of glass fusing appealed to the engineer in me and I found myself always thinking about new techniques that I wanted to try and working out processes to achieve specific designs. That’s still what drives me today, over 20 years later.

What’s your art background? Where did you learn your art?
I don’t have a formal art background. My career, from which I am now retired, was as a software engineer. My engineering background continues to be a strong influence on my glass art. I love to play with processes and combine techniques from multiple disciplines to try and achieve something new. There are a number of excellent glass art schools and organizations here in Oregon and I’ve been very fortunate in opportunities to learn from dozens of truly gifted glass artists and instructors. I continue to be fascinated by new techniques and there are always more classes on my horizon.

What memorable responses have you had to your work?
A visitor to my booth at a show looked at one of my rainbow colored “Radiant” bowls and said: “Looking at that just makes me happy”.

What research do you do before you start a project?
Where possible, I like to start by making a drawing of what I want a piece to look like. This is usually done on a computer where I can easily edit and play with shapes, sizes and colors. For complex pieces, I use the computer model to dissect the work into component parts which can then be constructed separately. I take extensive notes about each kiln firing I do, so when I’m finally ready to convert the computer image into glass, I have a reference library of previous work to consult in order to get just the effect I want. If I am doing something new, I’ll often do some test pieces first to work out the details before committing to larger work.