Portland Open Studios turns 25 this year. As an annual citywide open studio tour, we span many neighborhoods – in fact, the neighborhoods, or communities, are the core of who we are. 

During the tour this year, on Oct. 14-15 and 21-22, from 10 am-5 pm, you can visit 111 artists in seven different communities.  The free tour guide is available online at www.portlandopenstudios.com.

Let us introduce you to our seven communities, by meeting one artist from each of them. 

Outer Southwest

Includes: Lake Oswego, West Linn, Oregon City, Sherwood, Tigard, and adjacent SW Portland

Beth Yazhari’s colorful, complex mixed media paintings come from a lifetime of development as an artist. 

“I started out studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago,” she says.  “But I was really attracted to fiber arts, which overlapped with the women’s empowerment movement.”

Her creations, which she describes as Persian carpet meets Amish quilt meets abstract painting, include both fabrics and paint, and while they might seem planned, she says the works take on a life of their own.  “I will often start with a textile that is the core inspiration,” she says.  “I use acrylic mediums to adhere the fabric to canvas and then add paint and other pieces in concentric patterns.”  Her creations can take months to build, and she’s often working on multiple pieces at once.

Yazhari is an important community builder.  Not only is she a long-time participant in Portland Open Studios. She’s also helping organize the first Lake Oswego Open Studio tour, which launches for the first time this year – the same first weekend as Portland Open Studios.  She’ll participate in both tours.

“I’ve been so nurtured by Portland Open Studios over the years, and I thought we had enough artists in LO to do something similar,” she says. “Artists need a lot of encouragement.  It’s easy to feel isolated.  So having that critical mass of artists grouped together, where you can share notes and learn from each other, it energizes you.”

Inner Southwest

Includes: Downtown Portland, Goose Hollow, and adjacent Southwest Portland

Painter William Hernandez moved from busy, bustling, urban Northeast to SW Portland one year ago, seeking the spaciousness and peaceful quality of life in the Southwest suburbs.  But he wasn’t sure how that was going to affect his experience of Portland Open Studios, of which he is a four-year veteran.

“In the Northeast, I lived near a busy street, but it was easy to walk to stores and parks,” he says.  “In Southwest Portland, I have space and privacy, but I am very dependent on my car.”

Hernandez says he was pleasantly surprised by how many people came to find him. 

“Of course, my friends and patrons came out, but also, so many of my neighbors who were interested in the art process came by.”

Hernandez studied at one of the oldest and most established art schools in Lima, Peru, from where he originally hails.  His work has evolved into a distinctive narrative style.  In the last two years, he has begun painting murals, so you might see his work on walls all over the city, particularly schoolyards.

Northwest

Includes:  Northwest District, West Hills, and Northwest Heights

For many years, Natasha Ramras was a visitor to Portland Open Studios.  This year, she is participating for the first time as a painter.  

With a background of professional art training from her native Russia, Ramras has been painting on the side for years, while she works her day job in finance with the city of Vancouver.   About ten years ago, she says, she wanted to up her practice and began working with the book “Daily Painting” by Carol Marine.

“That really got me working more regularly – you know, it’s hard with a full-time job to balance the art practice, and this book really helped me do it,” she says.  

You’ll see traditional oils and also linocuts and pastels at her studio in the Northwest neighborhood.

She is enjoying Portland Open Studios not only for the opportunity to make her work available to the wider public for feedback but also for the professional training and classes the non-profit offers to participating artists.  “It is so helpful,” she says.  “The business side of art is so large.”

North

Includes:  St. Johns, North Williams, Arbor Lodge, University Park, and any other street with a “North” in front of it

“How did it start?” muses glass artist Nathan Sandberg.  “Well, my earliest memories of making art were of digging clay out of the banks of Lake Erie, making a little pot by hand, and firing it in the campfire.”

Ceramics led to photography, which he studied in high school and college, but it was a three-week course in glass blowing and bead-making in Seattle, Washington, that set him on his current course, working with glass. 

Originally from the East Coast, Sandberg came to Portland to work for Bullseye Glass as an educator and curriculum developer, a job he held for nearly a decade before going off on his own as an artist and teacher.   Perhaps because of his pottery beginnings, he moved away from glass blowing to kiln-fired glass work, a unique process that involves firing glass in a kiln over time rather than blasting it with a torch.   He currently has work in a show at Pittsburgh Glass Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

A visit to Sandberg’s studio will take you to a warehouse on North Columbia Blvd, one of the few warehouse spaces left for artists in the city.   This is Sandberg’s third year as a Portland Open Studios artist.

“It’s just me in the studio,” he says.  “It gets kind of isolating.  I can’t wait to get the word out about my practice and what I do.  I look forward to introducing folks to my form of glass work.

Northeast

Includes:  Albina, Alberta, Mississippi, Cully, and other neighborhoods with a NE street sign

Whatever job Gesine Krätzner has done much of her career, her whimsical, quirky characters show up.   As a professional animator, the job that brought her to Portland from her native Germany back in 1995, she gradually moved into character design.   After leaving that full-time work in 2013, her forays into children’s book illustration and eventually, garden planter design and her own ceramics, her characters, affectionately entitled the “blob house” have taken center stage.

 “All my design work has always looked a bit like what I do with ceramics now,” she says, chuckling.

Krätzner is located in the heart of Northeast Portland, a neighborhood rich with artists of all stripes.  Though she’s a three-year open studios veteran, she is excited to introduce visitors to a new studio she and her husband, Mykle, built in the back of their house.   Visitors will stroll past free-range chickens and the neighboring family, which share the big backyard with Gesine and Mykle.

 “Before I just turned my living room and dining room into a showroom,” she says.  “Now I’ve got this amazing place to show people, I can’t wait.”

Outer Southeast

Includes:  Sellwood, Moreland, Creston, Johnson Creek, Foster/Powell, Brentwood areas

Russian natives Elena Markova and her son, Trifon Markov (in Russian, last names for women have an extra sound), are third and fourth-generation artists, respectively.   

After moving to Portland about a decade ago, they’ve each taken the traditional art school education they got from their home country and developed it in different ways.  “We both like impressionism, folklore, and nature,” 31-year-old Trifon explains.  “These are themes in both our work.”

For three years, the mother son duo ran MarkovCo Gallery in a Pearl District location, and before that, they sold artwork at the Portland Saturday Market.  At the onset of the COVID epidemic, they closed the gallery and relocated it to their two-car garage on SE 82^nd Avenue. 

This is Elena’s second open studios, and Trifon’s first.  “Last year, I went around to see all the studios,” he said.  “It was very interesting to me.”

Working together, he says, is the most supportive environment he can imagine. 

“There is always someone to talk to about your artistic process,” he says.  “We never run out of things to talk about.”

Inner Southeast

Includes:  Laurelhurst, Kerns, Buckman, Richmond, and South Tabor

The path to abstract painting, as Thérèse Murdza knows, is a long and winding one.  She engaged nearly every art form in getting there.

“Before I could tie my own shoes, I learned to play a small accordion from my music teacher dad. It was 1967, and I was three,” she says. 

Music studies predominated high school, and she moved to avant garde theatre, writing, directing, and producing in college, expanding into poetry and prose after she graduated in 1986. It wasn’t until 13 years later that these creative works became visual when she stood in front of a “big wall with big paper.”

“Hands and thick pencils. Sure and unsure. Writing and unraveling words. Drawing and dissolving letters into shapes and lines. Seeing music, hearing words, feeling deep into language. Going under and coming up into the middle of something potent and... visual,” she says.

Since 2001, she’s been working with design professionals, gallerists, and private clients to install her artwork in collections worldwide.  She’s looking forward to meeting you during Portland Open Studios, a rare opportunity for the public to peek in on her process.

“My studio is where I work full-time, yes, and it's also a classroom, a playroom, a laboratory, and a refuge. A welcoming place for gathering, discovery, and learning, and a place to slow down,” she says. “I spend most of my days happily working alone in the studio, and then, as a self-employed person, long hours keeping up the business end of things and selling the work … the annual Portland Open Studios event creates an opportunity for relaxed visits with friends and fans, new and long-loved, and plenty of unstructured time to look at the paint together. These connections nourish and meaningfully support my work (and our spirits) through the year.”