(Artist Steve Gevurtz in studio | Photo courtesy of Melissa McGlenn)
On the south-facing slope of Aubrey Butte, with Bend spread out below him, Steve Gevurtz stood at a workbench applying patina to a bronze. Not the patina. One layer of more than thirty, brushed on and worked in and left to settle before the next.
That is the sort of thing you can only learn by standing within the room.
For two days this September, fourteen artists across Bend will open the rooms where they work. The third annual Bend Artists’ Studio Tour runs Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27, from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon on both days. It costs nothing, there is no set route, and you can build the weekend however you like.
We tend to think of art in Central Oregon as something that lives in galleries, hung and lit and waiting. But in and among us is a growing number of working artists, some well known and some just emerging, making things in spare rooms and garages and garden sheds all over town. One of them may be your next-door neighbor, and you would have no way of knowing.
The sculptor’s hillside
Gevurtz has been making figurative bronze and ceramic sculpture for twenty-six years, and his subjects are people, many of them dancers and models, caught in the half-second where a gesture is still becoming itself. His studio holds the whole arc of the process at once: pieces barely begun, pieces mid-transformation, and more than fifty finished bronzes standing quietly along the walls, so that walking through is a little like walking through time. This year it will also hold the first showing of his newest series, thirty-three sculptures titled From Within These Walls.
Carleton Manor
Jesica Carleton works out of a 1920s bed and breakfast in the heart of Bend, a house with the kind of history that shows in the woodwork. Inside, the shelves hold glass in what appears to be every color that has ever existed, and the tables are covered end to end with mosaic projects in various states of becoming. Step outside and the garden continues the thought, with mosaics set among the plants, and with a cat perched in a windowsill watching the whole operation with mild interest.
Carleton has spent her career resisting the idea that an artist ought to have one consistent voice, and she is drawn to mosaic in part for its generosity, believing it can make an artist out of someone certain they aren’t one.
She is hosting two others. Judi McAlpin, known as the Wild Crone, was born to a family of an artist and a musician and says she never had a chance of being normal; she focuses on pottery while wandering steadily through lampwork, photography, and paint. Nancy Joy picked up a brush in 2020, when the world went quiet, and her work has moved between loose abstraction and playful still life ever since, all bold color and confident marks.
The studio with no walls
There is one stop on this tour where the studio is the whole outdoors. Kenneth Meyer spent the first twelve years of his life in rural southern Oregon, where entertainment meant going outside and staying there. He studied ecology, spent his working life in the forest as a biologist, and now spends his free hours out with a camera. He will tell you plainly that he does not have a studio like the other artists. The natural areas are the studio. He brings the images home, adjusts the light, removes the small intrusions that pull the eye where it shouldn’t go, and refuses to add anything that wasn’t there. His mission, as he describes it, is to capture the beauty of the moment exactly as it existed.
The gardener’s studio
Liz Kolstad’s studio sits amidst rows of homes in the quaint Foxborough Neighborhood. You walk through a high desert garden, so that by the time you arrive you have already seen half of what she paints. She is a master gardener. She mentioned it almost in passing, and the moment she said it, her florals made complete sense.
Kolstad always wanted to be an artist and, in her own telling, accidentally became a psychologist instead. Retirement gave her time to lean in, and she has worked her way through acrylics, watercolors, collage, and most recently oil portraits, guided throughout by the Ben and Jerry motto: if it’s not fun, why do it.
Showing with her is Deborah Stevens, a watercolorist a few years into the medium who says she is still waiting to find out which style she’s best at, and who loves painting someone’s dog or cat most of all.
A lifetime on the walls
In the Mountain View Park neighborhood, Barbara Alford has turned a spare room into a studio, though the true studio is the house itself, where her work hangs on every wall.
She’s collected a couple hundred pastel pencils over the years! Sharing “Impressionism is my passion,”, her recent work finds her inching toward expressionism, toward a new freedom with less regard for detail. At ninety-two she is still after something she hasn’t caught yet.
Susan Hood is showing alongside her. Much of Hood’s work is made en plein air, standing in front of the scene itself, drawn to places that hold a stillness worth staying for; the paintings are grounded in what she observed but shaped by what she felt.
The she-shed in the pines
My own studio sits in the back garden of a house in southwest Bend, tucked among the pines, where the birds carry on all day and the deer come through often enough that I’ve stopped looking up.
Inside there are paints of every kind and markers and pencils, sticks, animal hides, horns, feathers, rocks and stacks of paper, because I have never met a surface I didn’t want to create on. My art journals are open for anyone who wants to turn the pages, including sketches drawn out of dreams I still intend to bring into full color one day. There will be handmade drums as well, in every stage: hides, hoops, and finished pieces waiting to be played.
Deschutes River Woods
Denise Rich works at the edge of town, where the city has already begun to give way to something quieter. She retired last year after running Sage Custom Framing and Gallery and is spending the freedom on her own work. She can hardly remember a time when she didn’t have a pencil or brush in her hand, has belonged to SageBrushers since 1992, helped found Plein Air Painters of Oregon, and keeps a garden that would justify the drive on its own.
Laura Jo Sherman is showing with her, bringing thirty years of pastel and a painter’s attention to whatever holds meaning for her at the moment, lately Oregon mustangs and the endless variety of color and shape in flowers. She thinks of painting as a way of speaking visually, in her own colorful voice, to whoever is looking.
The gallery
Not every stop is a private studio. The SageBrushers Gallery and Studio sits in Southwest Crossing in a 1940s cottage converted room by room into a gallery, a library, and a working studio. Over the weekend, artists Scott Dyer and Sally MacAllister will both be doing live painting demonstrations. Dyer works in oil, drawn to holding the beauty and emotion of a single moment on canvas. MacAllister found instant inspiration in the high desert when she moved here and paints what she feels rather than only what she sees. The gallery’s figurative show will be up, with work from dozens of SageBrushers artists, and there is an artists’ reception Saturday afternoon from two until four.
The Society goes back to 1952, when five enthusiastic artists set out to promote the arts in Central Oregon. For more than seventy years it has held to that, teaching classes and keeping a studio open and giving artists a place to show their work, whether they are hanging a piece for the first time or the two hundredth.
Two days, eight stops
In a single afternoon you can move from a sculptor’s hillside to a mosaic garden to a house in Mountain View Park with a lifetime of pastel on the walls, and never once see the same thing twice. These are rooms you would never otherwise see. For two days, the doors are open.
Third Annual Bend Artists’ Studio Tour
Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27, 11-4pm
Free and self-guided
Studio map and full artist list: sagebrushersartofbend.com/artists-studio-tour-2026
Presented by SageBrushers Art Society