They are off the beaten track but well worth the trip.
And for another year, Mel Bolen and Karen Holden opened up their North Star Gallery to the public for a weekend showing of their artwork May 13 to 14.
Holden loves opening up her studio to people because their work is local as well as their clientele.
Even being a combined 22 km out of Humboldt, Bolen says the community really rallies around their studio and gallery, with this being around their 20th year of open studio.
Even though they are in the Humboldt area, this is a chance for Holden and Bolen to see lots of people they rarely get to see throughout the year as all walks of life come and check out their work, including some regulars that make the open studio a yearly outing.
As well as every available wall and table proudly used to show Holden and Bolen’s work, the weekend also included live music by local musicians Kevin and Michelle Ackermann as well as live demonstrations by Bolen at his wheel or at his kiln. With the questionable weather the backyard tours of Bolen’s kilns were not as open as he would have wanted them to be but the SPCA fundraiser barbecue was still able to go on with some creative resettling in Bolen and Holden’s garage.
Both Bolen and Holden need plenty of space as Bolen takes his pottery from clay recipes to works of art as well as Holden with her painting of local landscapes, some being incredibly large pieces of work.
The mixture of science and art is what drew Bolen to work and create pottery as he starts all his pieces down to the very basic forms of clay and mixes it from there.
Basically geology in reverse, he says.
“I take all the bits of clay and mix it with water and I fire it and it gets rock hard again. Eventually the pieces will be all ground up again and ready for another pot millions of years from now.”
Holden has been painting for the last 25 years after selling Cottage Boutique with the majority of her work being landscape pieces around the local area with a few northern landscape pieces thrown in.
“There’s so much material to work with in this area.”
The studio itself is an old church that was left to the mercies of nature and locals when Bolen was looking for a studio space back in the 1970s.
“People were starting to drink and throw bottles through the windows, someone took all the main floor out of it...here it’s been maintained and kept up. We planted all these trees and made it into a beautiful park.”
Unfortunately, Holden and Bolen are looking to the future and now have the building up for sale.
With their cottage not far from their current location it will not be a long move but it will be a hard one with plenty of equipment and material to think about.
Bolen says it is time that they passed the studio on to the next generation.
“If a young artist couple got it and made good use of this, we’re going to be driving by it every second day back and forth.”
It will be hard for them, says Bolen, but there are things they still want to do both personally and professionally so the art and connections to the land in all their work will still continue.
“We’re not quitting by any means, we’re just going across the road and downsizing. We’ve got a bucket list too and this has been all encompassing.”
