The Saugerties Artists Studio Tour will be held Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 8 and 9, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days. With 46 artists participating, it will be the largest in the history of the annual event.

Founded in 2002 with eleven participating artists, the tour was first organized by landscape painter Nancy Campbell, a past executive director of the Woodstock School of Art. The following year, her schedule led her to ask Saugerties artist Barbara Bravo to take over.

With the help of numerous artists and volunteers, Bravo has organized it every year since, including in 2020, when the tour was held virtually with the help of photographer Michael Nelson, who filmed interviews with that year’s artists. Thirteen of his three-to-five-minute videos are on the artists’ pages of the tour website.

Ceramic artist Marsha Kaufman-Rubenstein has participated every year since the tour began, and she has watched it change as more artists have moved to Saugerties. In the early years, more crafts were shown; now the tour includes more two-dimensional work, including photography. Sculpture is also prominent.

First-time participant Fred Kahl, who moved to Saugerties in 2024, creates cast glass sculptures. He is “anxious to explore light,” he said, and designs his own software to illuminate his glass pieces with hundreds of individually controlled LED lights.

Kahl is not the only artist on the tour using new technology. Painter Josepha Gutelius uses her phone to search online for images like the ancient Roman sculptures that inspire her Roman Elegies series. She sometimes begins by drawing an ink pen sketch of a face or body onto the back of a canvas and then smudging it with water so “it shines through.” She may also photograph a work in progress and try out ideas by altering the photograph before making changes to the work itself.

Many artists will show mixed-media work. Kate Rivers glues book covers onto paper, then stitches them, she said, “the way one would stitch a quilt.” After mounting the result on canvas, she covers the area to be painted with clear gesso and creates the painting. Jerelyn Mason makes cards and collages that incorporate old photographs and recycled materials. Sculptor Michael Ciccone mixes brick, stone and steel, often salvaged from construction sites where he has worked.

More traditional work is included as well. Jan Wallen draws custom pet portraits in colored pencil. Landscape paintings by the late Raymond J. Steiner, most created with a palette knife, will be on view in his studio.

Most of the work visitors will see is for sale, ranging from abstract and representational paintings and sculptures to pieces made in multiples, like Kahl’s t-shirts or the sets of etched porcelain bowls made by Kaufman-Rubenstein. Bravo, once a production potter, now makes individual pieces.

The line between art and commercial work may be in the eye of the beholder, but it also reflects the artist’s experience. Nelson, a commercial photographer for many years, sees a sharp difference. In commercial work, he said, his job is to “make everybody else look great,” whereas “art is kind of what happens while you’re in the process … like playing with toys.”

After completing academic degrees in art, Kaufman-Rubenstein studied on the Greek island of Sifnos with a potter whose output, she said, “was all production work, mostly cookware with very few pitchers and vases.” Her own pieces were more decorative and often sold to tourists who assumed a local Greek artisan had made them.

With 46 studios open over two days, visitors will want to browse the tour website and consult the map to plan a route. Nelson says it is “harder to see more than six studios in a day,” though Bravo recalls one visitor in a recent year who “dashed in and out because she wanted to visit every studio on the tour.” More often, visitors linger — talking with the artists, taking in the work and sitting in the gardens many of them have created.

Free maps for the self-guided tour are available at the Saugerties Public Library, many Saugerties businesses, the Woodstock Public Library, the Woodstock School of Art and the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum. Maps are also available by mail from tour organizer Barbara Bravo, bbravo@hvc.rr.com.

Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.