North-metro artists invite you to drop in

In some ways, the North Artists' Studio Crawl this weekend looks to be more of an art haul than an art crawl.

With more than 30 artists in 13 studios and a half-dozen cities, you're going to need a car to see it all.

This 8-year-old art festival is centered in Anoka and radiates out to include Ramsey, Coon Rapids, Blaine, Andover, Bethel and East Bethel. It includes painting, pottery, fine jewelry, pottery, glass and photography. (For a map, see www.nascrawl.org.)

Among participating painters is Pat Undis, whose Turtle Pond Studio is located at 5165 NW. 149th Lane in Ramsey.

Undis co-founded the crawl with silversmith Gary Erickson in 2000. At the time, there were 10 artists. Since then, it's grown to include more than 30.

For the first time this year, the north-metro group invited other guest artists from around the Twin Cities to show work.

"That way, we can have a large amount of different artists working in different media, without a lot of stops," Undis said.

The festival began, she said, out of interest to "create our own thing. ... We thought: Let's do a crawl like they do in St. Paul or Minneapolis."

"But instead of doing in an art studio building, we'll do it from our home studios," she said. "Every year it's grown and we've gotten a little better at it."

By now, she said, the crawl has grown to the point that the group hires a firm to do marketing and has a mailing list of 6,500. Undis said 80 percent of the attendees are new to the event and her own studio receives visits from roughly 100 to 200 people over two days.

Glass artist Doug Becker, of Bethel, travels to about 20 art fairs across the nation and has been blowing glass for almost 30 years. This is his fourth north-metro crawl and it's a nice change to stay in his own back yard, he said.

"People from around here are going to be customers for a long time. You develop friendships and they come back."

People who stop by Becker's studio (Becker Glass, 22342 NE. Palisades St., Bethel) get to see him and other artists doing a particularly energetic form of art-making.

"We blow glass throughout the day. The students are blowing, I'm blowing, the other two fellas that are here both blow," he said. "And glass-blowing is really something you should see. It's quite a process. ... It's not just blowing bubbles. When the glass is hot and it's moving and there are flames and a 2,000-degree temperature, it's a pretty intense art form."

Gary Erickson, a silversmith and gemstone jewelry artist in Coon Rapids, goes to Arizona every year to buy his gemstones, looking for unusual agates, jaspers, fossil corals and even dinosaur bones. His studio is located at 12400 NW. Holly Circle.

"A lot of them I get from the guys who actually do the mining," he said. "I'm getting them right from the source."

Erickson co-founded the crawl and has been doing his art for about 30 years. He, too, travels to about 20 fairs a year.

The result of his work, he said, is based on the stone.

"I design my silver to work with the stone and accent the patterns. I do drawings that work around the stones. Each piece is designed with a particular stone in mind. It's not just a piece of stone popped into something."

Eric M. Hanson • 612-673-7517