NotableArt


Art walk


THE 16TH ANNUAL ARTISTS’ STUDIO TOUROFFERS A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT MORE THAN 100 ARTISTS AND STUDIOS


By Lisa Crawford Watson
Herald Correspondent


   Seashells don’t litter the white sand of Carmel Beach. That is not to say you can’t discover some, here or there, a scattering of limpets; on occasion, a sand dollar.
   But the larger, intact shells are hard to find in abundance and even harder to leave behind.
The beachcombers, who know how and when and where, must have handsome collections by now, gathered in an art bowl on the coffee table or sculpted into a stone wall in the yard. But it takes time.
   Seashells come in different sizes, shapes and shades, particularly for Desiree Gillingham-Produit.
   At first light, the artist can be found in her A-frame studio on a hill overlooking the Carmel Valley, the sun filtering through the canopy of an elderly oak to light her work as she creates Shell

young; I took it for granted, Ia suppose. Then, I got into another life with horses and hunting. Yet, in that interim, I lived with my Shell Shades and, to their credit, never tired of them. I suppose you could say they wear well; they never stop fascinating me. And I wondered about that.”
   What’s different now, she imagines, is that she is a different person, in part because she is older, with different values and perspectives. Or maybe she is the same but enhanced, matured in life and in art.
   Back in custom production for nearly two years, the only real difference, she’s found besides updated and new compositions, is that she now wears glasses for the precision work.
   “I can’t wait to get up in the morning to get into my studio,” she said. “There is so much potential in a palette of naturally colored seashells, so many directions to explore and pieces wanting creation. I wake up in the night and turn on my bedside light to make note of the beautiful images in my head.”
   You can see the manifestations of such night visions this weekend during the 16th annual Monterey County Artists Studio Tour, during which Produit will be among 106 local artists offering guests a behind-the-scenes vantage on their artistry.

Shades, fine-art Tiffany-stylelamp shades crafted  of a montage of seashells.
  It is, perhaps the complexity of a natural thing, illuminated, that fascinates Produit most and lured her back, after a near 20-year hiatus, into the studio and back to the crafting of Shell Shades.
   “I made these Shell Shades years ago, for nine years,” said Produit. “It was too easy and I was