Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Los Gatos artist M.J. Orcutt is one of many local artists who will open their homes April 27 and 28 as part of the Artists' Open Studios.

Artists welcome visitors to studios

By Shari Kaplan

Blossoms open everywhere in the month of April, and dozens of studios will open as well when hundreds of artists spend the next few weekends welcoming visitors during the 10th annual Artists' Open Studios of Santa Clara County.

The event began in 1985 with a group of artists in downtown San Jose who wished to acquaint the general public, art aficionados, collectors and educators with works created by local artists.

Tour locales include homes and home studios as well as shared work spaces, warehouses and professional studios.

Marian Gault of Monte Sereno is in her third year as an Open Studios participant and praises it as a way for artists to remain in their own element while enjoying personal interactions with different types of viewers.

"Artists can show their work without having to go to a gallery or put on a show," Gault says. "There are all kinds of people coming through. Some just like to look at art; some are in the market to possibly buy. Sometimes there are even gallery people."

Gault calls herself a calligrapher, although she also creates watercolor paintings and detailed pen-and-ink drawings. "It's a nice skill to have and useful for lots of things," she says of calligraphy.

In her watercolors, often still-lifes or natural scenes, Gault says she is sometimes inspired to pick up a calligraphy pen and incorporate some well-known saying or quote as part of the finished piece. Pen-and-ink work currently takes up the least amount of the time she spends in her home studio, although she loves drawing.

Los Gatos artist and poet M.J. Orcutt wanted to keep her home and studio apart, so she converted her garage into a bright, airy creative space in which she works with a large mix of media. One of her favorite media is refuse, which she calls "the detritus of our technology--toxic, intrusive and permanent." She blends these scraps with those from another favorite source: Nature (with a capital N) and the environment.

Orcutt's signature "Pod Books" look like dark, earthy seedpods but open to reveal hard, turnable pages formed from a melange of plastic, plaster, wood, paper, branches, leaves and trash. In her blending of the organic and synthetic, Orcutt conveys the encroaching influence humans have on the natural world. Some Pod Books also contain snippets of poems or sentences written by Orcutt or others.

Another series, "Refuse to Fly," Orcutt describes as "kites made of natural materials encumbered with nonrecyclable refuse." She enjoys playing with the double meaning of the homonym, because, as she explains, refuse (junk) is often that which is refused. Wings on the metal-framed kites often consist of plastic bags removed from polluted waterways.

"Most of my work is metaphoric in character," she says, adding that she encourages people to interact with her works by picking them up and touching them. "Sea Totems," "Branch Poems" and sculptures of salvaged Styrofoam are among Orcutt's other favorites, all dealing in some way with the symbiosis of humans and Nature.

Los Gatan Laila Montgomery also incorporates natural themes into her artwork. Her specialty is using glazes to paint colorful scenes of flowers, plants and animals as well as inanimate objects and abstract patterns onto tiles or other earthenware, which she then fires in her own kilns.

Montgomery has run "Tiles by Laila" out of her home studio since 1991, after she hired someone to decorate tiles in her new home. Montgomery looked at the work, thought she could do even better, and has done so ever since. She has also taken many art classes along the way.

Among her fortés are color- and design-matching so that selected tiles in a bathroom or kitchen, for example, can be decorated with the same hues and patterns as the room's wallpaper. She can copy motifs or draw freehand.

"It's a very specialty field. You don't have an end product until it's fired--some people find that unnerving," says Montgomery, who doesn't.

Artists representing Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Holy City and nearby parts of San Jose April 27-28 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. include Janet Bajorek, Nahda Balaa, Lou Bermingham, Claire Burke, Forrest Butler, Linda Fillhardt, Oneida Hammond, Marian Gault, Marie Grace, Veronica Gross, Dolly Cahill Johnson, Nancy Jerome, Judith Juncker, Amy Konsterlie, Carrie La Riviere, Margo Leguillon, Michelle Mickelson-Ruffo, Laila Montgomery, Greetje Ockeloen, M.J. Orcutt, Juliette Rys, Kathleen Sharp, Mercy Smullen, Tom Stanton and Francisco Velasco.

Information and maps are available at Los Gatos Art Supplies,
61-A Victory Lane, and at Encore Gallery, 59-A N. Santa Cruz Ave. Catalogues with photographs are available for $10. For more information, call (415) 969-9905.