Tubac Art Tour “The first time I came to Tubac it was like falling in love,” says Carol St. John. “I felt drunk on the air.” In Tubac, crowded with art galleries, Carol St. John plays matchmaker, bringing together artists and viewers. Artist, writer, and teacher St. John combines her skills when she leads the Experience Tubac art tours. She aims to help people discover the essence of one of Arizona’s oldest towns and meet artists who work there. The historic town hides off the freeway south of Tucson, so far south that it seems part of Mexico. Ten participants gather in St. John’s studio/gallery at 9:00 a.m., sipping coffee to ward off the morning chill. In the complex called “ El Presidito” small studios wrap around a courtyard mimicking a Spanish Presidio, or fort. Built in the mid twentieth century, the rough adobe walls look much older. St. John skims quickly over the history of the oft-destroyed and oft-rebuilt village before she turns to the subject of art. Her bright paintings form a backdrop and conversation pieces for the group. During the tour, three other artists will open their studios to the guests and St. John’s mission is to prepare her clients to understand more clearly the language of art. In her studio, before the tour they loosen their own artistic muscles and play with line, form, and color. Everyone participates in a series of hands-on activities meant to awaken the visitors’ ability to better understand the artists they will meet. Not knowing quite what is expected of them, individuals poke and prod small balls of clay and then name the resulting sculptures. Names range from fanciful, “The Embrace,” to pragmatic, “The Rock” to ironic, “ George.” Sarah rolls her eyes at her husband Robert’s joke. Only one name is unacceptable. When Chris says, “This is called ‘lack of artistic ability,’” St. John quickly responds, “Nope. Can’t go there,” as she launches into her theme that everyone has the right to think of him or herself as an artist. A hilarious exercise in group painting has seven newly minted artists and three others with actual experience, circling a table. Stop. Dip brush in your chosen color. Dribble, spray or drip for a few seconds, then shuffle on and dip again until St. John declares the butcher paper “canvas” fully covered. After putting away paints and washing multi-colored hands, men and women file out of the studio and down the street to explore Tubac and meet their fellow artists. St. John pauses on a bridge over the Santa Cruz River to talk about history. Tubac’s past includes swords and crosses, the picks and shovels of miners and more recently, paintbrushes, carving tools, and checkbooks. Spanish soldiers built a Presidio to protect Mission St. Gertrude and to expand their northern empire. The explorer and soldier Juan Batista De Anza, in charge of the Presidio de Tubac in the 1760s, led an expedition to San Francisco. One hundred years later, Charles Poston attracted one thousand people to Tubac to work in his nearby silver mines. Nearly another century went by until Marjorie and Dale Nichols started the flood of paint when they established an art school in 1948. On this tour, St. John will introduce a painter who composes abstract shape and line, another who seeks the essence of color in landscape, and a third who sculpts and carves, releasing the natural forms of the material. Near the eastern edge of Tubac, where horses pose in pastures studded with cottonwoods, St. John’s group straggles into the quiet courtyard of Virginia Hall’s gallery. Mysterious arrangements of rock and sparse plantings lead to the home and gallery. Inside, a black grand piano on the gray stone floor dominates the nearly monochrome room. Huge abstract paintings similarly drained of color line the walls. With her childlike face and round glasses, Virginia Hall looks like a little girl playing at being a grownup but graying hair says otherwise. But she arrived in town in 1979, and is known as the Grande Dame of Tubac artists. She seems as mysterious and challenging as her paintings as she leads the group through the back of the house to her studio. Unfinished paintings in the palest mist of black and gray hang on the wall. Although she says that she does not talk about her art, because it needs to speak for itself, Robert asks about courting the creative spirit. “Time has no meaning.” She hesitates and says she has no words for it, and then she tries again. “Time just totally disappears.” Robert persists. “How do you find that place?” “For me, I just get out of my own way.” Hall realizes that some people just do not “get” her enigmatic paintings and she delights in the moment of realization that art sometimes brings. “One of my favorite things is when a couple comes in—and they’ve been married about fifty years—and he’ll say, ‘I love that,’ and she’ll say, ‘You DO?’ Suddenly they turn and see each other for the first time. That is kind of an interesting thing.” Carol St. John gets people loaded into cars and leads the caravan to David Simon’s hilltop home. Participants unwrap their deli lunches on a porch with expansive views and chat about artists and their intentions. Simons, arriving from an art class he is teaching, invites the group into his living room which serves as a gallery. Light fills the high-ceilinged room and sharpens the vivid colors of Simon’s oil landscape paintings. The paintings covering the white walls burst with azures, purples, lively greens, and sunshiny yellows as they depict mountain and desert scenes that look almost like a place you may have visited. Unlike Hall, who turned away from color when she felt her work getting stale, Simons strives to get the exact value of the colors of nature. He calls the process “chasing beauty.” The color is more important than the subject, he explains. One painting focuses on a rusting car slowly merging with its background of nature. When the artist leads the way to his one-car garage sized studio, the group gets a glimpse of his dual life. His tiny studio doubles as a construction office. The left half is left-brained—flow charts and calendars crammed with deadlines. The right half is right-brained—paintings leaning on easels or stacked every which way. Despite the fact that David Simons has been a working artist for 22 years, he also creates buildings as an architect and builder. The caravan leaves Simons’ hilltop and heads south of Tubac. After a bit of searching, they find the studio of Jim Toner, formerly of Santa Fe. He is also a builder of sorts, but the furniture pieces he makes blur the line between utility and art. Starting on the West Coast, carving custom-designed furniture pieces like the swan table he sold to Prince Charles and Princess Diana, his work evolved to include sculptures, both realistic and abstract. He now lives and works in Carmen, Arizona, a speck on the map beside Tubac. His warehouse-like studio is home to a lot of industrial-sized equipment because Toner works in several media, all three-dimensional and most very large. He carves stone and wood, creates fanciful furniture, and shapes life-sized birds from plastilene and larger animals in clays, preparing for bronze casting. Everything in the studio is grimy from the rock and wood dust. A boom box and a stack of classical and jazz CDs sit on a side table. “Episode in an Artist’s Life” from Berlioz’ “Symphony Fantastique” fills the air. Toner shows the visitors an abstract mesquite wood carving, a complex symphony of curves. A carver since childhood, the shapes naturally present in the wood—whorls that one can see in seashells, waves, and plants—fascinate him. In contrast to the abstract wood piece, two high-backed wooden chairs look like refugees from a Renaissance manse. The patterned damask covering the seats looks antique, but the intricate carvings on the back are just a tad too modern to be a real relic from the past. Behind them, a thoroughly modern floor lamp stands testament to the endless variety of this artist’s creation. The tour group has interrupted him as he works on some small birds that he is forming of plastilene. Since the material never hardens, the birds are built on an armature of wire. Bird books are propped open to show Toner the exact look of real birds, but his objective is to create something different. “I am trying to leave the real and reach for the fantastic world,” he says. Carol St. John asks about his relationship to his tools, and he picks up a handful of chisels. “I have 200 chisels,” he says, “the finest made.” He explains that wood demands very exact sizes and angles of tools. Of all the materials he works with, wood is the most demanding, he says. However, Toner explores other materials as well. “I just brought in 1000 pounds of rock,” he says, excited about the possibilities. “I am collecting great stones,” he says. “I spent hours and hours and hours at the Tucson Gem and Mineral show. I am trying to learn the language of more precious stones.” Even his furniture designs are changing, with wood carving or metal that includes art glass or bronze. Once back at their starting place, the travelers cut up the group painting which has been drying in the courtyard sun, and frame each piece as a souvenir. Reluctant to leave, they ponder what they have seen and experienced. While thousands of visitors stroll through Tubac in a year, “Parking your car and walking around is different than participation,” says Joy. “You are cheating yourself if you only go to the gallery, without meeting the artist,” says Chris. And off they go to meet more artists and drink the air of Tubac.
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