Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   This time of year, when the aspens start to turn, most mountain dwellers start to put away their summer projects to ready their homes for winter. But for at least six Nederland area mountain artists, now is the time to show off their summer’s work as they ready their studios for the Open Studios Tour. Taking place the first three weekends in October, the annual exhibition replaces galleries with the intimacy of 125 artists’ workshops and homes, open to the general public. Now in its 23rd year, the tour’s goal remains unchanged: to connect visual artists with people who love art by inviting artists to share not just their work but their spaces and processes.

With its gorgeous vistas and contemplative forests, the Front Range of Colorado is an ideal place for art making, so it’s no surprise that there are so many artists living in these hills where dozens, if not hundreds, of creatives call home.

Even if you’re not trying to find their work, you are bound to run into it on the walls and shelves of Peak-to-Peak businesses. Open Studios is an opportunity to take matters into your own hands, get in your car, and see these artworks married with their contexts. It is one thing to fall in love with an artwork on an anonymous wall, to feel it speaking just to you, but quite another to be captured by one in its place of making, to learn its story and allow it to interweave with your own.

To celebrate the mountain area artists included in this year’s tour, here is a preview of the behind-the-scenes glance to which you are all invited. Four artists, Leah DiCapio, Julie Naster, Bonnie Hanna, and Nancy Kirkendall opened their studios to the Mountain-Ear as if to look through their art and into its soul. We thank them for the generosity inherent in such an act. Like a magician who reveals their trick, except in this case the magic in the art is not lost but enhanced.

Leah DiCapio

Leah DiCapio has made art all of her life. Raised in a family of artists, she remembers setting up art stands on the side of the road in Pine Junction, Colorado where she’d sell paintings and weavings to passersby. Now in her early forties, her makeshift stands have matured into an artistic paradise of a studio on Magnolia Road.

When you pull into their flat parcel of land you’ll feel like you’re entering an enchanted forest, full of pines and aspens filtering the sun into glittering reflections. Dotting the yard are various pieces of art: a teepee Leah made with her son, an old carved bench from the land’s previous owner, a spiraling metal sculpture slowly being covered with tiles, ceramic totem poles. Walk through them and you’ll find your way to Leah’s long and narrow studio. Open the door and you’ll be hit with the sweet smell of damp clay.

Inside, Leah and her husband, Scott, work together to make low fired ceramic pieces. The forms, thrown by Scott, are as simple as they are useful: cups, bowls, plates. Each is covered by the black and white designs of Leah, who paints each piece in slip and carves out playful designs inspired by her landscape. Trained as a fine artist, Leah explains that she sees no distinction between craft, also known as functional art, and fine art, hailed for its aesthetic value.

“I think a painting on your wall and a cup in your hands both serve a function, so I don’t separate the two,” she says. “I like making things that bring ceremony back into the world. I think a little reverence for the everyday is important.”

Julie Naster

If you met Julie Naster three years ago and asked her what she did she would have told you she was an engineer on the verge of retirement. She might have added that the rammed earth house built by her and her husband on 18 acres on Porter Ranch Road was also, always, an ongoing project. She would have said nothing about being a wood-fire ceramic artist.

Although ceramics was a part of her, Julie hadn’t had her hands in clay for quite a while, perhaps as long as thirty years, since she was in college, but she never doubted she would return to the art form. One day she woke up and knew it was time and got straight to work setting up a home studio.

Today, in 2018, Julie Naster has what she calls an unconventional studio, “my studio triangle,” with an indoor room for throwing and hand building, a garage kiln and glaze room, and outside, a masterpiece in and of itself, a handmade wood fire kiln. Her process is a physical one, not just because of the walking from studio space to studio space, but because her chosen style of ceramics requires that the artist is in corporeal relationship to her medium. To make her work she must transform blocks of clay into forms, silica into glaze, wood into fire, and fire into sustained 2,300 degree heat baths. The resulting hand-sized pieces — cups, sake sets, bowls — each carry an undeniable resemblance to the rocks and minerals from whence they came.

Standing outside of her earthen house and in front of her kiln, Julie says the earth is a part of her, that it always has been, although she doesn’t necessarily know where it comes from.

“What I do is driven by the process itself and informed some by considerations of what is pleasing to look at and to hold,” she says. “I don’t necessarily know where it comes from, although thinking about it later I know it’s because that’s where I come from too. I am from the mountains of Colorado and so that’s what my pieces look like.”

Bonnie Hanna

Bonnie Hanna lives in a tiny miner’s cabin on Sugarloaf Road. In addition to her expansive view of Boulder, her yard is filled with old outhouses from the wild mining days, a fire pit that she uses for flowers, and a shady nook of old cottonwood trees, protected by her adorable but ferocious dog.

Inside, her house cuts to the chase, where the glass walled foyer is her artist studio, complete with a trimming wheel, racks of drying pots, tools and boxes of clay. Her wheel is facing directly East, perching above the view of the plains with a font row seat to the sunrise.

Bonnie has been making pots her entire life, earning her bachelors in ceramics and arts education from New York’s Pratt Institute and going on to study and teach ceramics all over the world. But the art that Bonnie makes today, that she is known for, didn’t come about until she and her husband moved to Colorado in 2012 and fell in love with the western aesthetic and the western way of life.

Her pieces, made from a luminous, micaceous clay mined in the Southwest, are a marriage of dozens of native pottery traditions and of Bonnie Hanna herself. She begins by throwing voluminous forms on the wheel, blowing them out to look like the water vessels that inspire her.

After bisqueing them, she either prepares them to be smoked in a pit fire or studies them until a pattern emerges. In the first case she will cover them with horse hair and collected feathers before burying them in coffee grounds and sawdust and lighting the whole thing on fire. In the latter, she will sit for hours, turning into days, while she paints unmeasured patterns onto their surfaces; the result amazingly mathematical.

So often we modern people are amazed at the precision of prehistoric creation, for example the Sun Dagger at Chaco, a feat of archeoastronomy that defies our understanding of what was once possible. But Bonnie sees the genius in the simplicity of these civilizations, their monuments in reverence to simple observations of the universe, and her art making doesn’t just honor them, but brings them to life in her working hands.

Nancy Kirkendall

Nancy Kirkendall is a realtor.

“I love homes, I love people, I love real estate,” she says. “I’m a natural at that, but I love art and I always have. I declared myself an art major my freshman year and, even though I didn’t feel as talented as the other kids, I listened to that little voice of passion that told me to keep doing what I loved.”

But life has a way of taking turns. She dropped out of college to become a transcendental meditation instructor, returned to school for a degree in literature, and became an English teacher. She got married. She became a realtor. Then one day, seven years ago, she decided to take the Open Studios tour.

“I walked into this studio in Boulder and fell in love with a painting on the wall,” she says. “I wanted to buy it but couldn’t afford it and gave my regrets to the artist. She said, “Why don’t you sign up for classes with me instead?” So I did. Seven years later I’ve been accepted into my first Open Studios showing with the teacher I met way back when.”

If you’ve been to Salto lately you’ve seen her teacher’s work, Lael Har’s vivid nature inspired paintings are on display there through September. And, if you’ve been to Salto, or Blue Moon or the Community Art Fair in the last few years, you’ve likely seen Nancy’s work too. If you’ve seen them both, you can’t deny the resemblance.

Now as friends and studio mates, their artistic journeys are intertwined, and they are evolving together, step-by-step. Their canvas, once covered in vivid objective art abstractions, have now morphed into non-objective scenes that Nancy describes as mediations of inner worlds.

“I go into a flow, meditative except my eyes are open and I am super conscious,” she says. “But it also takes work. You have to let it flow out and then go back and refine and edit and because you don’t have anything as a reference point except for your own inner sense of composition and color, it can be harder than painting anything objectively real.”

The 23rd Open Studios Tour begins on October 6, 2018. Go to https://www.openstudios.org for a full list of participating artists and a studio map.   A FREE self-guided tour of 137 juried artists working studios taking place the first three weekends of October, noon to 6pm each day. Meet the artists, learn about their creative processes and collect their art. Open Studios features top artists in and near Boulder. Artist information, maps and more available on-line at OpenStudios.org.