The neighborhood residents will be on this year’s White Rock Lake Artists’ Studio Tour.

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

Every October for more than two decades, artists around White Rock Lake have invited dozens of strangers into their homes and studios to view their work, learn about their artistic process and, more importantly, experience their space.

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“The real heart of this, and I think it’s so much fun, is to see where artists work,” says Marty Ray, one of the founders of the White Rock Lake Artists’ Studio Tour.

This year the studio tour is the weekend of Oct. 12 and 13, and it features more than 45 artist studios in the White Rock Lake area.

Ray started the tour 21 years ago with potter Michael Obranovich and sculptor David Hickman. Originally it was just the three of them and a handful of their artist friends. Now, there are more artist studios on the tour each year than visitors could begin to see in one weekend, and there’s a waiting list for artists, who often wait years for an available space to open up on the tour map.

“If an artist has a studio that they use regularly, you don’t have to worry about their art; it’s going to be good.”

“This is like the Academy Awards for me,” says artist Juli Hulcy, who has been on the tour for six years. “Seriously, I get so excited about this every year.”

Each studio is as different as the artist and the artist’s art. Some artists work in an office or workshop, some work from their homes, and some work in custom-built studios in their backyards. The important thing is that they work, and that they have a space to do it, Ray says. “If an artist has a studio that they use regularly, you don’t have to worry about their art; it’s going to be good.”

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

‘Mother Nature’s Jewelry’

Mosaic artist Hulcy opens the door to her backyard studio and ushers three of her seven dogs inside before entering. The large space and white walls give the room a clean and somewhat organized feel.

Shelves along the wall house dozens of jars and containers filled with colorful glass pieces of various cuts and textures. Half-finished mosaics are propped against the furniture, and a handful of finished pieces hang along the far wall with a row of sketches dangling beneath them.

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

Mosaic artist Juli Hulcy: Brandy Barham

This is where Hulcy works — brainstorming projects, sketching out designs, cutting pieces of glass, firing the pieces in a kiln and arranging them on silhouette-like pieces of wood or metal.

But her studio is more than just a space to her. It’s an embodiment of herself and a reminder of her late husband, Doug, who built the studio for her before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease last November.

“When we sold our old house, we could’ve done anything he wanted with the money. We could’ve traveled,” Hulcy says, smiling with tears in her eyes, “but he wanted to make sure I was OK, so he built this place for me.”

Hulcy has been drawing for as long as she can remember, she says. Doug was her best critic and her biggest fan. He understood her happy, whimsical style.

About 10 years ago Hulcy discovered glass, and it quickly became an obsession, she says. There were so many possibilities of what she could do with it.

I like happy. I don’t get the whole artistic angst thing.

At first she bought buckets of small one-to-two-inch glass tiles of various colors and textures. Then she began cutting larger pieces from stained glass panes because she could fashion them into precise shapes with a glass-cutter.

From there, she began carving curlicues into the larger pieces, and she started firing them in a kiln to make them smooth and glossy. Recently she began trying her hand at layering, and so far she’s enjoying the results.

Most of her work depicts animals — birds and fish with bold, animated eyes and other fanciful creatures with playful expressions.

“I think birds and fish are Mother Nature’s jewelry,” she says.

“I like happy. I don’t get the whole artistic angst thing. I just don’t understand that. If you’re creating, why should there be any angst? You have a gift and you get to use it. To me, it’s all about the happy.”

Mixed-media artist Silvia Thornton: Brandy Barham

Mixed-media artist Silvia Thornton: Brandy Barham

Studio scrapbook

Silvia Thornton buzzes around her home, pointing out various pieces of art — each one reminding her of a story, or an award, or another piece of art or knick-knack, which she then hurries off to retrieve.

Thornton works in a colorful room she had built onto the back of her house. It’s heavily windowed in a way that makes it reminiscent of a sunroom, and it’s filled with finished pieces of her work, bulky equipment and scraps of yet-to-be-used material.

Thornton is a mixed-media artist whose work has evolved many times in her more than 40 years as a professional artist, as evidenced by the walls of her house, which seem to act as a scrapbook gallery for her life in art.

“I try to keep something from every decade,” she explains.

She began her artistic career in her 20s, working with computer-aided design (CAD), and then she switched over to watercolors in her 30s, during the 1980s. At that time, she took a watercolor class from a retired SMU professor whom she credits with teaching her the basics about color, design and style. “She really drilled those things into me,” she says.

Even in the ’80s, Thornton began venturing out with mixed-media art, she says. “The watercolor just wasn’t enough. I like layers because I think that’s how life is. How can you not have that in your art?”

Mixed-media artist Silvia Thornton: Brandy Barham

Mixed-media artist Silvia Thornton: Brandy Barham

In the ’90s, she began working with acrylics, painting murals. “Everybody wanted murals in the ’90s,” she says. “That was a big thing.” But although she was good at it, it was her least favorite type of art because it was so structured and precise.

“I love working spontaneously,” she says. “Realism is not my nature. I’m more abstract, and who you are comes out.”

Around that time, she won a trip to Paris through the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts (the National School of Fine Arts in Paris); about the same time she won a silver metal through the Societe Academique des Arts Sciences et Lettres de Paris.

So she spent some time traveling, visiting places such as Italy and Guatemala. “I would go to places and bring back what I felt about it, and then paint that for a long time,” she says.

While in Italy for a six-week study sabbatical at Santa Reparata International School of Art, Thornton became enamored with the Ponte Sant’Angelo (“the angel bridge”) in Rome, and she used that in her art for many years.

“Realism is not my nature. I’m more abstract, and who you are comes out.”

Another of her pieces, “Pere Lachaise,” was inspired by a trip to the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison of the Doors is buried. As Thornton walked through the cemetery, she heard “Riders on the Storm” playing in the distance. At first she thought she was hallucinating, but when she looked across the street, she noticed a man smiling and waving from his window, with his record player playing. She later used that memory to create an intricate piece, which now hangs in her studio.

Although she has plenty of pieces that are purely aesthetic or decorative, Thornton believes her best pieces are the ones with personal stories behind them.

“I think it’s more difficult,” she explains. “The purely aesthetic pieces, the skill is in the painting and the design. But the stuff where I incorporate my life, it takes both skill and emotional connection.”

Wood craftsman Richard Wincorn: Brandy Barham

Wood craftsman Richard Wincorn: Brandy Barham

Against the grain

Wood craftsman Richard Wincorn opens the door to his office and workshop on Cayuga where he designs, builds and sells furniture and other woodwork projects. The entryway, where several sturdy pieces of half-finished furniture are stacked against the right wall, looks masculine and professional.

On the far wall, a rugged slice of polished mesquite that proudly states “Richard Wincorn Studios” hangs alone above a heavy desk.

The piece is the byproduct of an artistic journey upon which Wincorn only recently embarked, and he’s not exactly sure where it’s taking him.

“Crafts are constantly evolving,” he explains.

For decades, lines, shapes and symmetry have defined Wincorn’s work. For Wincorn, the art and skill is in brainstorming and sketching designs and then actualizing the idea into sturdy, polished pieces of furniture.

Wood craftsman Richard Wincorn: Brandy Barham

Wood craftsman Richard Wincorn: Brandy Barham

Working with the slabs of mesquite wood calls for an artistic process that’s backward from his typical style. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, he says, he is forced to look at each cut of wood and ask himself, “What does this piece of wood want to be — a table? A bench? A clock? A headboard?”

“It’s hard to get my arms around because I’m so used to being in the confines of a certain style or a piece as a certain function, whether it’s an architectural piece or a piece of furniture,” he says.

“Once you leave that territory, it’s like stepping off in a totally different direction.”

As a young man, Wincorn landed in furniture-making almost by accident while going to school for architecture in Santa Fe, N.M.

“I knew about the time I was a sophomore in college that I wanted to learn about making furniture, but I didn’t have the experience, and my dad had no interest,” he says. “I don’t know where it came from.”

So he began dabbling in the art form.

“I got a book at the library about making New Mexican furniture, and I was trying to make a miniature jewelry chest, and all I had were garden tools — I was just sort of whittling it,” Wincorn says.

“I’d be on the front porch putzing around with it and my next-door neighbor would see me, and one day he came over and said, ‘I work with that furniture maker’s wife, and his apprentice just quit. I see you out here fooling around with this stuff all the time; you obviously have patience, and you seem to be interested. You want to go meet him?’

And that’s how Wincorn met the man who later became his first mentor, John Zoltai.

“It was serendipity,” he says.

Most of the furniture he made with Zoltai was 17th-century Spanish- and Italian-style, he says. Over the years, Wincorn has worked in countless styles, cultures and time periods. Although he says variety is both “a blessing and a curse,” he tries to be flexible. “Because I do custom orders, it’s whatever walks through the doors. I see it as a challenge,” he says.

He recently began working with mesquite because it intrigues him. It’s a popular style in other places, although he hasn’t found much of a market for it in Dallas, he says. Regardless of whether or not it sells, it’s been a refreshing change of pace, and he often finds himself pondering in his spare time what to make with a certain slice of wood.

“It seems like my addiction,” he says. “I can’t seem to leave it.”