The Red Deer Arts Council is thrilled to announce its fifth Open Studio Tour, taking place September 18^th and 19^th, 2021! This is a self-guided tour of artist studio spaces and free to the public.

Seven visual artists in five studios bring you this amazing experience. They will open the doors to their private art studios from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm and welcome the public to see the process of creating fine art as each artist demonstrates their process. Fascinating techniques and works of some of Red Deer and area’s most recognized artists will be on display for visitors.

This self-guided tour is free of charge. The artists will demonstrate the processes they use, and happily take questions about their media, style, technique, or anything related to art. Artists love to answer questions about their art!

Please Note: some artists are open both days, others open either Saturday or Sunday only. Please check each listing to see which artists are participating on that date or any additional hours they may host.

Download the complete list of artists and addresses HERE.

OPEN STUDIO TOUR LIST OF ARTISTS 2021

Saturday, September 18th Only – 10am to 4pm

Margaret R. Hall
Happy Yak Felt and Maggie’s Millinery
48 Good Crescent, Red Deer, AB
[email protected]
403-346-8289

Margaret Hall is a fibre artist and enjoys fabricating whimsical functional items. Working mostly with wool, she enjoys exploring the sculptural properties of wool and combining hand felting and traditional millinery techniques to make unique hats.

Demo: Margaret will demonstrate the difference between blocking a hat with a hand felted hood and an industrially produced felt hood.

*****

Saturday, September 18th and Sunday, September 19th – 10 am to 4 pm

*Please note additional hour changes for individual artists

Susan Delaney
4611 – 48 Street, Red Deer, AB
403-341-9488
www.instagram.com/susandelaneyartist

Susan Delaney is currently making intriguing mixed media portraits and abstract compositions featuring photo image transfer, painting, drawing, collage, and embedded objects. Susan is also well known for her vibrant, expressive landscape paintings.

DEMO: Susan will be demonstrating image transfer and painting, including both deliberate and intuitive artistic decision-making.

*****

View Across the Vallery, Oil, 2021, Carol Lynn Gilchrist

Carol Lynn Gilchrist, ASA
Riverlands Artist Studio/Gallery IS
5123 – 48 Street (Alexander Way), Red Deer, AB
[email protected], 403-596-8890
www.clgilchrist.com

Carol Lynn celebrates the landscape in a range of media and styles. Her work in watercolour, acrylic, and oil are inspired by nature; skies and water worlds that are filled with light, colour and movement that are part real and part imagined. She has just opened her own studio and welcomes everyone to drop in and say hello!

DEMO: Carol Lynn will be working on a WIP (that’s art speak for a ‘work in progress’) and will share her thoughts on composition and offer some plein air painting tips.

Guest Artist at Riverlands

Roberta Murray, ASA
Riverlands Artist Studio/Gallery IS
[email protected], 587-457-1201
www.robertamurray.ca

Roberta Murray is a full-time visual storyteller working in paint, pencil, and pixels. Roberta’s work reflects her passions, dreams, and desires regardless of the medium she works in. Birds, wildlife, flora, and the land are all explored in her work. She tries to represent ordinary scenes in a poetic, expressive way to capture a fleeting mood or impression, not to mirror what is easily seen. “I don’t paint the landscape. I paint the spirit disguised as a landscape.”

*****

Country Sunshine-Watercolour, Marianne Harris

Marianne Harris
Paintwerx Studios
95 Piper Drive, Red Deer, AB
[email protected], 403-350-8106
Additional Hours: Friday 5 pm to 8 pm

Marianne creates 2D artwork in water-based media. Her work is prolific and varied in its subject, style, and size, from photographic realism to more semi-abstract pieces, often inspired from her photography. Her work is available at the A+ Gallery, and is also currently showing until October 11 in the Kiwanis Gallery at the Red Deer Library.
DEMO: Watercolour miniature landscapes demonstrating basic techniques.

Guest Artist at Paintwerx Studios

Winter Returns Again, Amanda Frost

Amanda Frost
Amanda Frost Artwork
95 Piper Drive, Red Deer, AB
[email protected], 403-596-6372
Additional Hours: Friday 5 pm to 8 pm

Amanda’s artwork is bold and beautiful, from landscapes, to animals, or a combination of the two. Photographs are often used for reference, but colours from nature’s palette are often improvised and enhanced. Her work can be seen at the A+ Gallery in downtown Red Deer.

Marlene Kallstrom-Barritt
Kallstrom Studio
5750 – 41 Street Crescent (West Park), Red Deer, AB
www.kallstromstudio.com, 403-307-3620
www.facebook.com/kallstromstudio
***Shortened Hours for Sunday, 1 pm to 4 pm

Marlene explores several water-based art mediums to create mixed media art that combines abstraction and realism. In other words, she plays with an alarmingly growing amount of art supplies to make paintings of familiar subjects done differently. Lately, she’s been waxing watercolours and working on a new series.

DEMO: explaining waxed watercolours (and showing off latest art supply purchase)

The downloadable list of artists is available HERE.

The Red Deer Arts Council is a publicly funded, non-profit organization with a mandate to support all art forms and raise the profile of the arts in the community.

An exploration of the garden through a lifetime of artwork by noted western Canadian painter David More.

Book launch with artist on Saturday, September 11, 2021, from 2:00-4:00 PM, at the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery (MAG) – public and media welcome.

As Red Deer’s cultural scene grows and matures, it is important to build a record of those who have made the path, inspired us, and used their creative talent to expand our perception of the world around us.

Greatest Garden: The Paintings of David More is a celebration of Benalto landscape painter David More’s engagement with the garden as a multifaceted subject. Featuring over fifty original artworks, this book encompasses a career spent in conversation with gardens in their many and varied forms. With lively brushwork, a keen sense of colour, and an aptitude for expressive drawing and varied composition, More has found the garden in expected and unexpected places.

David More will be onsite for the book launch at the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery (MAG) on Saturday, September 11, 2021, from 2-4pm.

Come meet the artist and pick up your signed copy of this beautiful collection of artworks for the member’s price of $30 (September 11 only; regular price is $40). This book is published by University of Calgary Press.

Words from Executive Director, Lorna Johnson:

“The Board and Staff of the MAG are so proud of this publication. It was a delight to work with Dave, Mary-Beth and the University of Calgary Press to realize our vision for a publication that would reflect Dave’s work and celebrate his generous gift of works to the MAG. It is an important milestone in documenting the art history of Central Alberta.”

Words from David More  

“Being the subject of a book is truly a privilege during one’s lifetime. Greatest Garden: The Paintings of David More allows for the vision my wife Yvette and I share to reach a much wider world.  Just as importantly, this book brings the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery to the international stage, where it deserves to be. Lorna Johnson and her amazing team have raised the profile of the Red Deer MAG to unimagined heights during her tenure. Working with delightful author Mary-Beth Laviolette and the distinguished University of Calgary Press over the last year has given us a most memorable journey.”

David More and his wife Yvette Brideau, donated 200 of his paintings and drawings to the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery in 2019. In that same year, to recognize Dave’s generous gift, the MAG hosted a retrospective exhibition of his work that was curated and organized by independent curator Mary-Beth Laviolette. As an extension of her research, and in celebration of Dave’s artistic achievements, Mary-Beth also wrote Greatest Garden. Published by the University of Calgary Press, Greatest Garden beautifully examines the multiple subjects that have captured Dave’s attention and imagination over the years, and reflects the evolution of his artistic practice.

About David More

David More is one of western Canada’s exceptional painters. Based in the rural hamlet of Benalto, near Red Deer Alberta, he is part of a generation of landscape artists who emerged in the 1970s to make beauty out of the ordinary and challenge the expected with bold acts of creation.

Throughout his career, More has returned to the garden as a deeply functional yet ritualistic space of human endeavour. The garden is a place of shelter and sanctuary, of colour and fragrance, of order and wilderness. The garden is a private space, carefully tended and planted, observed en plein air or through the living-room window. The garden is a public space, a park where people gather to let their natures blossom. The garden is the world, the nature that sustains and surrounds us, the environment we all live within, and all have a responsibility to cultivate and tend.

About the Author

Mary-Beth Laviolette is an independent curator and writer with a visual art practice spanning forty years. She is the author of An Alberta Art Chronicle and A Delicate Art: Artists, Wildflowers, and Native Plants of the West. She has curated exhibitions for the Art Gallery of Alberta, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, the Whyte Museum, and more. Mary-Beth is the recipient of many awards, including the Alberta Centennial Medal and Artist in the Spotlight.