Yellow Springs Artist Studio Tour: Meet my guest artists

The Yellow Springs Artist Studio Tour is this coming weekend...Sat., Oct. 16 and Sun. Oct. 17, from 11 am-6 pm both days. This is my third year participating on the tour, and this is the 10th tour so we've decided to do something a little different this year...guest artists! Each of the 8 host artists will have some guest artist in their studio.

My first guest is Theresa Mayer. Theresa lives in Yellow Springs and works with glass. She makes lampwork beads that can be worn as necklaces or used to embellish other projects. Above is a photo of the first pair of beads that I bought from Theresa...I liked them because they looked like a tiny universe. She also makes beads with tiny landscapes on them.

She says, "I began to play with glass when I took some traditional stained glass classes. Then I got a mini kiln and became enthralled with fusing. One day just for fun I signed up for a lampworking bead making class at the Springfield Art Museum. I became addicted to taking rods of glass and melting them in front of my eyes and turning them in to beads. As I began with my first nearly beads I struggled to get shape and form. As practice made that come more naturally I have discovered that I could express feelings and emotions in the beads. What I find the most fun is that different people see different things in them, so the adventure begins with the viewer and their imagination."

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My other guest is J. Austin Jennings, who lives in Kettering. She is a painter and has been exploring mixed media by incorporating a collage technique in her paintings. At left is "Less Traveled" which I own.

She says, "Creating art is a process of ‘seek and hide.’ I sort through life, selecting scenes, looking for secrets, and pursuing the oft-overlooked ironies of the natural world. In the studio the seeking continues. I search out colors, textures, value tones and fascinating images. Cut paper, shards of printed material lay scattered across the worktable. The pieces reassemble themselves to form a new whole in a process I like to compare to alchemy...a transmutation of small, ordinary scraps into a more profound whole. Then the viewer becomes the seeker—finding secrets I myself have hidden."