Since the days of caveman paintings, there’s been something magical about places where extraordinary art is created.

Once a year for the past 14 years, villagers have had opportunities to experience such settings during the weekend Corrales Art Studio Tour. It comes again May 5-6 at studios and galleries throughout the village.

Artwork by 60 creators will be displayed for visitors on the self-guided tour 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A preview of the tour will be available at Rancho de Corrales event center, 4895 Corrales Road, for an orientation and guide to where artists of special interest can be located.

A preview reception, admission $20 to benefit the Corrales Arts Center and ARCA, will be held at Rancho de Corrales Thursday, May 3, 5-8 p.m.

This year the preview exhibition will include art produced by fourth grade students at Corrales Elementary and Cottonwood Montessori.

For most visitors, the tour will likely begin at one of the tents erected at entrances to the village and at other prime locations.  Tents at Corrales Frontier Mart, Rancho de Corrales, the intersection of Loma Larga and Meadowlark Lane, and along Corrales Road at the north end of the valley will offer maps,  brochures and general orientation. 

Among the 60 participating artists are those working in oil paints, watercolor, sculpture, fiber art, photography, jewelry, pottery, ceramics, glass, mixed media, cut paper, montage and drawings. Works shown will be offered for sale at a wide range of prices.

One of the exhibitors, Mickie Sharp, has an open-air studio off Cabezon Road where she produces metal sculpture intended for outdoor installations. She and painter Juan Wijngaard are featured below.

Among the 60 artists participating this year are: Jana Grover, Elaine Bolz, Rick Snow, Ray and Betsy Shaw, Ali Launer, Sylvia Gormley, Dyanne Strongbow, Barbara Clark, Doris Wagner, Kate Reightley, Krysteen Waszak, Pietro Palladini, David Keene, Doreman and Sheri Burns, Mel and Pauline Eisenstadt, Mariana Roumell-Gasteyer  and Susan Zimmerman, to name a few.

Juan Wijngaard’s studio is along Camino los Milagros a little west of Loma Larga. There he paints mostly in oils and egg tempera with the finesse and inspiration of the “old masters.”

His work has been widely shown and admired through ongoing offerings at Corrales Bosque Gallery, the artists’ co-op for which he is currently president.

Born in Argentina, Wijngaard said he got started in art as a boy drawing in classrooms, like most artists. But he had another early introduction; his mother was an artist who mostly produced surrealistic work. At his  home in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, art was just something that family members did,  he said, like working in the garden and washing the car.

But seeing his mother’s art was a little discouraging to him because he recognized his was not as successful as hers. “I was just floundering around. I couldn’t get the paints to behave. It wasn’t what I expected, so it was mostly an exercise in frustration.”

Even so, he entered art school where he was steered toward graphic design and printmaking. But he realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do. He chose illustration instead. He did post-graduate work in illustration in London. A book publisher recruited him from the art school to illustrate children’s books, a career he has followed ever since.

Wijngaard works mostly in oils for his landscapes and in egg tempera for his portraits and retablos.

Earlier this year he produced an illustration for the cover for the latest book from Corrales-based Rhombus Publishing Company titled The Wild West Never Died: true crime tales of 20th century New Mexico.

A trans-Atlantic, eventually unsuccessful, romantic relationship brought him to the United States. He settled temporarily in California where he met the woman he married. They moved from Los Angeles to Corrales. after their son was born.

Wijngaard (he is of Dutch parentage)  began painting in egg tempera just last year. “I like things about both oils and tempera. Oils is very immediate; you see something and work very fast and get it down. Either an impression of it or something that you can work on later. Egg tempera needs to have a completely different state of  mind. You have to know what you’re going for before you start the first line.

“You have to make the paint fresh every time you use it because the medium is going to go sour.  So first thing in the morning you make your paints, and it requires a lot of attention. It is not slap-dash, as oils can be. Also, it dries almost immediately as you put it down, so you cannot spread it around or blend.”

In a year’s time, he completes about 20 paintings, mostly landscapes. “I draw and paint almost every day,” he said, but not all pieces are intended to be finished, saleable art.

There is something classical about the subject matter and poses of his portraits, perhaps in the style of Europe’s great masters. Wijngaard said, “I’m not consciously trying to make people think of  the Flemish masters, but I’m emulating the people that I admire, like Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Hans Memling (1430-1494).

He said he has admired the paintings of the Flemish old masters, and “I wanted to find out how they did it.” He also draws inspiration from contemporary painters like Ernst Fuchs of Vienna who developed a technique of mixing egg and oil as the medium.

Among the artwork he will offer from his studio during the weekend tour are numerous illustrations for children’s books.

Asked whether his artwork is headed in any new directions, Wijngaard said he is producing a new style for his retablo paintings. While a typical retablo might depict a saint executed in meticulous detail, his new subject matter might be a praying mantis or a chameleon. “I’m now moving in my own, personal direction using the elements that I’ve learned in the course of my explorations. The subject matter is more what I’m thinking about, rather than the more classical… like, ‘okay, I’m going to do an Adam and Eve painting.’ Instead I’m trying to go in a more original direction.”

Metal sculptor Mickie Sharp entered the art world just four years ago, after closing the Amerasia restaurant she owned and operated for 26 years in the university area.

Her Corrales property at the end of a dirt lane off Cabezon Road is filled with metal sculpture, mostly what would be considered yard art but including large pieces weighing more than a ton. Some pieces are the work of other sculptors she admires but most are her own creations. 

A large shed opposite her home contains an indoor space for watercolor paintings and a covered area open on three sides where she keeps metal cutting and working equipment such as a laser, powered hammer, forges and compressors. Inside and surrounding the shed are countless found pieces of metal and sheets salvaged from places like the Sunflower Market.

“I starting doing watercolors about 12 years ago. I was still working as a restauranteur at that time, so I didn’t do very much painting. But I’ve always had a yen for fire, so I started collecting iron things about 15 years ago— found objects, steel sheets, whatever. About four years ago I started doing metal work.

“As a young person, I never did any artwork at all. I’ve taken a few watercolor classes in the last four years, but  I’ve had no metal work classes. I loved cooking, but after 26 years I needed to start something else. I wanted to weld. Actually I do fabricating and some blacksmithing, but very little. I design things and fit them together.

She wants to do big, abstract pieces, but her market has mainly been the Art in the Park shows organized by Corrales Society of Artists where smaller, more portable objects sell better. “So I started doing animals, birds and frogs and lizards to take to Art in the Park. I always try to use found or recycled pieces of metal.”

She uses a drawn template to outline the object to be cut from the steel she has on hand, but they are all done by hand, “so each piece has its own personality. I have lots of fun doing this.”

Using the outline of the template chalked onto the steel, she cuts it with a plasma cutter.

She explained how she usually works when she produces abstracts. “I’ll just pick out a group of steel pieces lying around.  I’ll kind of look at them, and say, ‘Okay, I want this piece to be 18 inches tall, and this makes the stand, and here’s how they sit with each other, the spacial shapes, how they relate to each other.” 

While she sketches some sculpture before starting to fabricate, most compositions come as she moves the pieces around. “They will just make themselves, more or less.”

Sharp said she gets bored easily so she frequently changes from bird motifs to animals, masks using petroglyph images and abstracts. “I’m just starting to do buzzards,” she said. “I haven’t done bugs for a while.”

Most of those are small, ranging in price from $20 to $50, all intended to be mounted outdoors.

She has drawn inspiration from the late OK Harris and his outdoor sculptures, one of which can be seen outside Corrales FrontierMart. “His pieces all have humor, which I love. I have a lot of his pieces, which he would trade off when the restaurant would cater his events.”

When she adds color to her metal art, she often uses car paints which are more durable. “They can be outside forever and they don’t change.”

So far she hasn’t worked much with copper, brass or aluminum. “For aluminum you have to have a different welder. I like heavy steel, and I have so much of it to work with.”

The largest steel piece she has produced is about eight feet tall; the smallest not quite the size of a Kleenex box.

Among her largest is a four-foot-by-six-foot steel memorial to her deceased father. It is a “story board” mounted with cut steel objects representing facets of her father’s life. Sharp would like to take commissions to produce such memorials for other families’ dear departed.

Sharp produces several hundred small, two-dimensional pieces a year and just three or four of the bigger, heavier sculptures. She’s  hoping to do more of the larger pieces, “because those I really like.” 

She has produced several steel gates on commission, but she finds those a pain to mount since they can weigh 300 pounds or more. “A lot of times, it takes you as long to install them as to make them.”

She markets her work primarily through Art in the Park. 

As she improves her metal working skills, Sharp hopes to move up to sculpture six feet tall or more with moving parts. “I want to do pieces that really move. That’s what I’m studying now, and it will take me a while to get it down.”

Other artists participating in the tour this year are: Terry Adams, Jeanine Allen, Antone Alvernaz, Jackie 

Anderson, Lisa Benjamin, Thomas Boldt, Linda Boyes, Lynda Burch, Sara Cahn, Patrice Carbaugh, Cheryl Cathcart, Dennis Chamberlain, Steven Dank, Nancy Davis, Britt Densford, Linda Dillenback, Valerie Fladager, Sandra Garcia, Marcia Glenn, Sherry Gross, Jennifer Gutierrez, Jeffrey Howard, Elzbieta Kaleta, Chip Kamber, Michaela Karni, works by the late John Keyser, Carol Klimek, Tricia Larese, Michelle Martinez, Joyce Meck, Sue Orchant,  Adrian Panaro, Jeff Potter, Ric Speed, Sally Thomson, Wendell Unzicker, and Catherine Veblen.