photo credit: Michelle Marques
Artists Bug Thompson and Sharon Eisley are part of the Santa Rosa Open Studios event.

The second annual Santa Rosa Open Studios starts on Saturday. Over 50 artists will present their art to the public over the next two weekends.

Sonoma County is fertile ground for art of all kinds, and there are multiple programs for exhibiting fine arts.

Spring Maxfield, Director of Santa Rosa Urban Arts Partnership, says this new open studios event is filling an important role for the arts community.

“Opportunities for artists to have direct sales with customers are few and far between. We do have two very large open studio tours in Sonoma County and they are phenomenal. But there's only… that's four weekends a year for artists to really be part of something bigger than just, you know, their own private open studio nights,” said Maxfield. “And we were hearing feedback from many folks in the creative community saying they needed more opportunities.”

Maxfield says the fees are lower and the application process is streamlined to encourage participation.

“People who've never shown their work before, people who've just been dabbling as artists, uh really kind of gave them an opportunity with a low barrier of entry. to risk everything, so to speak, and open their studios to the public. And for some folks, it was a phenomenal success, and we have a lot of returning artists,” said Maxfield.

Two artists invited me to see their space while preparing for the two-weekend open studios event. Sharon Eisley and her nephew Bug Thompson set up their pieces in Eisley’s garage.

“I guess I'm kind of known for painting over the frame and even sometimes the frame becomes sort of a paradigm, our paradigms, or thinking out of the box, and so sometimes the wood even breaks right out of the frame or, you know, however much it goes into the frame is an extension of whatever that painting is, and yeah, so I definitely I like the quality of the wood, the life of the wood,” said Eisley.

Eisley incorporates a lot of symbolism into her art and has been illustrating paintings of the Tarot deck in recent years. The piece on her easel right now is the Wheel of Fortune…

“At the bottom, in one of the images I saw from the medieval wheel of fortunes, there was a figure that looked almost exactly like the hangman,” said Eisley. “So, that image popped into my head, though I gave him an Anubis head. And he is meditating, he's smiling slightly and all he can do is surrender when you're at the bottom of the wheel.”

Her nephew Bug Thompson works in oil paint as well, and his artistic focus is on a subject that many people struggle with.

“A lot of my work has themes of death, rebirth. I was brought up in a household that was very heavily influenced by grief and working with death. My grandmother, you know, her career was working with children with AIDS and HIV,” said Thompson. “And my mom, actually, she started her journey building her own business, pet care business. She was heavily influenced by losing one of her animals. And now she's doing pet loss grief coaching.”

While Eisley is an established professional artist, Thompson did his first show at last year’s Santa Rosa Open Studios.

“Experiencing these open studios and getting out there more has helped me a lot with talking about my work and talking to people,” Thompson said. “I think that's really all it is, is communication. Art to me at its core is communication and being able to have conversations with people just, you know, strangers and they're having a response to my artwork has been really exciting.”

Besides offering artists another outlet for their work, Maxfield says this also brings in tourist dollars to the economy.

“People come to Sonoma County and they're going to wine tours and they're going to cheese tours and farm tours and this is an opportunity to offer them something else where they can again benefit the arts community,” said Maxfield.

The Santa Rosa Open Studios spans two weekends, September 13th and 14th, and September 20th and 21st at locations all over the city. The map and online catalog are available at sropenstudios.com.