Local artists open up their studios and turn their homes into galleries for two weekends.

It’s the first year Lee Cox, a largely self-taught Carmel abstract painter, is taking part in the Monterey County Artists Studio Tour, so he doesn’t know whom to expect.

“Hopefully it’s people who want to buy art,” he says, only partly joking.

Cox’s 350-square-foot space, including a bathroom (to clean brushes), doesn’t offer a lot of room, but it is a shock to senses.

“Some people use a limited palette, but this is my expression,” he says about the paradise of bright patterns he surrounds himself with. There are dozens and dozens of abstract images hanging on tiny hooks, illuminated with a set of art lights. “If you are looking for an ocean landscape, this is not a place for you,” Cox observes, fixed in his admiration – and production – of abstract art in the tradition that started with American multimedia artist Robert Rauschenberg.

Cox explains his preference by repeating after one of his early teachers: “Some artists fall in love with the object, others fall in love with the process.”

Belonging to the second cohort, Cox dared to pick up a brush in 2006, after retiring from many years at Bell Communications. With time, the effect became interesting enough to let Cox not only sell his stuff, but be popular among youngsters. When his grandchildren move to a new space and a housewarming gift is in order, they ask: “Grandpa, can I have a painting?” And then, they want another one, he says.

A San Jose native, Cox has been coming to Carmel since he was 4 years old. He relocated permanently in 1997, then still merely an art lover. He is here because of the artists, he says, and he likes the fact there are over 100 others around him – perhaps working at this very moment – in Carmel.

Like many of them, he has countless pieces to sell and a couple of pieces he is not willing to sell at all. Maybe the most important of them is titled “Orchard Playground,” viewable on the very left upon entering the studio. Cox tells the story behind it.

“When I was a little boy, there was an orchard in my house with plum trees in it,” he starts, gesturing toward the image. It is not clear if it’s the trick of the eye or if the lines start moving, waking up the wind. “Every spring the grass would start to come up,” he continues, and now we are standing on a big field of new grass, spotted here and there, with patches of fresh mustard greens, as he points out. The plum tree can be seen now, too, with its reddish, almond-shaped leaves. Hidden between them, there is the snake of a ladder.

“We would climb up the ladder, me and my brother, to get the plums.”

THE 30TH MONTEREY COUNTY ARTISTS STUDIO TOUR has been picking up more and more artists each year, with 85 showing their work this year at 75 locations over the weekends of Oct. 8-9 and Oct. 15-16.

After taking over as organizer in 2016, Arts Habitat is now proudly presenting its sixth edition of the tour. They have made an effort to diversify who participates, but the event still suffers with over-representation of older, white painters on the Monterey Peninsula. If Arts Habitat Director Shirmaine Jones had a “magic wand,” she says she would wish for “dozens of young Black artists” and “a lot of local Spanish-speaking artists from places like Salinas” to participate.

They have made some progress to that end. “We have been offering a 50-percent reduction in the registration fee for Salinas and Salinas Valley artists,” Jones says. “We have also offered free registration to organizations in Seaside, Salinas and South County.”

In addition to that, the organization worked with three different locations to temporarily house those artists who don’t necessarily have the space to invite a little crowd of happy art hunters into their work space, which for some may also be their living space.

Carmel-based painter Celine Picus, for example, will be displaying her acrylic and oil works at The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, sharing the space with a few other artists. That’s the plan for the first weekend; on the second, she is inviting the public to her Carmel home, where she paints in her garage/living room. Picus has about 100 pieces ready to sell.

“I’ve been painting a lot,” she says. Before moving to the U.S. in 2014, Picus lived in Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore, doing commercial art and design. Now, painting is the center of her world. “All I want to do is paint,” she says, and – oversaturation or not – painting is not going anywhere. Nor should it.

Picus used to do a lot of oil paintings, she says, but these days she is making extremely vivid, purple-driven abstract art – bordering on hallucinatory impressionism. She wants to offer a cheerful respite to the harshness of world events.

“It’s an opportunity to mingle,” Picus says about her decision to join the tour. She just got off of an online meeting with another 100-plus artist participants. “This is my first time so I don’t know what to expect, but everybody is being very friendly.”

Arts Habitat provided an in-person “how to” class for the artists, with tips on things like how to prepare your space and how to include a sales tax. They also offered technological help to participants. While there is a registration fee of $200 (and $350 at the last minute), no organization gets a commission for artwork sold during the two-weekend event – it all goes straight to the artist.

“It’s definitely an opportunity for the artists to come out of their isolation,” Jones says. With the knowledge of a studio tour veteran, when it comes to turnout, she adds, “Of course, it all depends on the weather.”

Jewelry maker Laurie Tholen is in Royal Oaks in North County, promoting her work in both San Benito and Monterey counties. Nonetheless, “it’s brutal,” she says of her isolated location, admitting that she sells mostly on Etsy because not everybody wants to do the drive to get there.

On the other hand, she feels sorry for the painters. “You can fit a lot of earrings in one space,” she says, not mentioning that a pair of earrings or a necklace are proven to sell faster than a large painting. That being said, jewelry is “very competitive,” Tholen says, proud of her 35 years of developing her craft and style. She works with copper and etching, adorning her jewelry with beads or enamel. She chooses natural, floral or animal-based motifs.

If you decide to drive her way, Tholen lives in a Spanish-style townhouse and part of her garage is at her artistic disposal, courtesy of her husband. She has probably 8,000 pieces of jewelry to sell, and is happy to explain all the machinery behind it. Plus, her studio comes with a beautiful view.

That is the case with many studio tour locations, including another painter, Carmel Valley-based Nicole Jakaby, also a debutante at the tour. When she lived in the Bay Area, her driveway was too steep to have people over, and when she moved to Monterey County, she was welcomed by the pandemic.

“Last year I saw the pamphlet,” she says about the 2021 studio tour edition, “and now I have space.”

Her property, with a big vegetable garden, provides her not only with space, but also with endless inspiration because her art is a study of nature, often flora and fauna up close.

“My mother was a portrait artist,” Jakaby says. “She discouraged me from pursuing art.”

While Jakaby spent years in the health industry, the little girl who used to make art and put it in the neighbors’ boxes never went away. Jakaby let her return when she turned 60, she says, 12 years ago. She now works with photos as a start, taken by her and others.

Jakaby has at least 30 pieces to sell, excluding the “Hungarian horseman,” claimed by Jakaby’s Hungarian husband. But tentatively titled “Italian Siesta,” with a turquoise scooter, is likely still for sale.

“I looked at this photo and thought: The scooter is parked and the street is empty. It must be lunchtime.”

As an owner of a dog, two cats and a parrot, Jakaby loves to paint animals and took several trips to Africa to give them a good look.

“I love big cats,” she says, presenting another of her recent paintings, a leopard closeup. “They are awesome. I love painting their eyes.”

Part of the profit from each piece that Jakaby sells during the two weekends of the Monterey County Artists Studio Tour will be passed to Max’s Helping Paws and SPCA Monterey County.

CARMEL VALLEY-BASED NINA TEMPLE does ink work, often on very large, 9-foot-tall sheets of paper. (Something to think about if you have a big house with empty walls, or if you are responsible for decorating a big commercial space.) She has participated in the Monterey County Artists Studio Tour at least four times, and is planning to devote the second weekend of the tour to do some studio-hopping and art-shopping of her own.

“There’s a lot of talent,” she says. “This tour allows artists to invite people and show them a little bit of who we are. You kind of open up your kimono when you invite someone to your studio.”

With musician parents, Temple has been around the arts her whole life. An art major in college, she exhibited really young in Berlin and was successful with her inks before moving to commercial design. But Temple believes that 26 years of working for others made her really master the fundamentals of arts. Years later, she returned to inks, picking up right where she left off, with the same ease and sense of fun.

“Ink dries very quickly,” she says. “You have to be on your toes with it.”

Temple has 46 “extremely large pieces” and 10 “medium-sized” works of art to show during the studio tour. She does it to sell her work to collectors, new and old, but also to share her artistic process with them.

“People will spend up to an hour just picking your brain, getting to know why you do what you do, what the process is,” she says. “It’s like a two-day-long exhibit opening. A lot of talking.”

An art collector herself, Temple likes the idea of someone “waking up and enjoying my work every day with a cup of coffee.”

She believes that opening of communication with the public and with other artists is essential: “Art helps us express our values, build bridges between cultures and bring us together,” she says. “You are what you eat and everything you are exposed to comes out through your work, if you are honest.”

AT HER HOME AND ART STUDIO NEAR THE BEACH IN PACIFIC GROVE, Ann Nall will be showing 125 pieces of decoupage art on used glass, along with wine and chocolate. She’ll also use at least a dozen signs to direct visitors her way.

“The signs work,” she says, and she knows what she is talking about – Nall has been participating in the Artists Studio Tour for at least eight years.

All she needs to do to reveal her work is to open the garage curtain with a button and: voila!

“You get to meet far-flung neighbors from 20 houses down,” Nall says about the event. “Next thing you know, you are having wine together.”

It is not unusual that people come with this year’s tour flier and want to buy the featured image, she laughs. But she has all the time in the world to show them her other stuff: “I’ll have help so I can talk to people,” Nall says. She is fully prepared with her sister and friends helping (“they are real troopers”) so she can dive into conversation with visitors about her work.

Before finally settling down on Monterey Peninsula in early 2000s, London-born Nall spent decades on the East Coast, fundraising for PBS. She went back to her childhood passion, art, to relax. Before approaching decoupage – the art of decorating an object by gluing colored paper cut-outs onto it in combination with special paint effects, gold leaf, and other decorative elements – she did watercolor animal portraits for 30 years. But it’s acrylics and their opacity that made her think about the surfaces that attract her, and led her eventually to glass.

“Glass is marvelous because if I don’t like what I put on it, I just take a razor and scrape it off,” she says at first, but it’s clear that such a practical answer is just a tease. She could be decorating boxes or chairs, but ultimately it’s all “it’s about the light doing its thing.”

Nall proceeds to explain that when you deal with paper, the paper is your white and your light, and that you have to always compensate for it. We are staring at the piece of art that Nall is not planning to let go – not this year and probably never – a simple bowl of a muted palette, which she made two years prior. It could easily be an artifact from Pompeii.

“Glass is clear,” Nall explains. “I love the reflective qualities and the fact that it’s solid, but the light moves through it, so it’s there and it’s not, at the same time.”

She approaches a shelf full of used glass. “This stuff all comes from thrift shops. I’ve decorated hundreds and hundreds of pieces of what otherwise would be dead glass. I always leave enough light to get through the darkest paper. So the life of the glass is still there.”

Nall works both in her garage and in her house, at a glass desk, slips of very expensive paper and glue wafting all over the place. She always has to remind her clients that her products are not food-safe, they are not salad bowls, and all this glue and hard work will likely dissolve in a dishwasher or soapy water, but these are just details.

“It is always lovely when someone looks at you and says in a genuine fashion: This is beautiful.”

By now, Nall has participated in the tour enough times to know that people will come.

“You know you are an artist,” she says, when asked to give a word of encouragement to artists who are participating for the first time. “Otherwise you wouldn’t put yourself out there for the world to judge you. So your job on those weekends is to just enjoy it.”

For some, the question of who is going to come is a largely rhetorical question of an anxious mind – the question as big, mysterious and unknown as art itself.

“Who will come? Well, let’s see,” says Lee Cox, approaching the question methodically. “There are people that I met during my art show in Carmel Valley. On Instagram, I have 3,500 people following my work and there’s a network of about 250 that I follow. Some people will probably come as a favor to me, maybe other local artists. But maybe I will ask those who I don’t know: ‘Why are you here?’”

THE MONTEREY COUNTY ARTISTS STUDIO TOUR happens from 11am-5pm Saturday-Sunday Oct. 8-9 and Oct. 15-16 at locations all over Monterey County. Free to attend. Look for a guide inserted in this edition of the Weekly, or at artshabitat.org.