55 artists opening studio doors in county for tour

Analyn Anderson knows that the community of creatures with minds, hearts and souls extends far beyond human beings. The devoted and detailed animal portraits Anderson feels driven to create — in acrylic paint, colored pencil and mixed media — are suffused with the sort of individual, personal soul she grew up hearing that animals do not have. Anderson’s best friend for nearly two decades was a cat named Lacy. A few years ago, Anderson took up the colored pencils her husband gave her for Christmas, made a portrait of Lacy and entered it in a contest at the Clark County Fair. While it didn’t win any prize, it did captivate one of the art jurors and his wife, who bought it because it reminded them of their own beloved cat, who had recently died. Seeing her portrait of Lacy walk out the door with strangers was emotionally tough for Anderson, she said. But it also reassured her that there’s a community of pet-loving people with no doubt that animals are not so different from humans. And, those people are just as eager to immortalize their pets in portraits as Anderson was eager to cherish and portray her beloved Lacy. You can peruse Anderson’s paintings and other artworks — including her pet portraiture, extreme close-ups of animal eyes (where their souls are obvious) and studies of women-and-animal kindred spirits — in person, at her home studio near downtown Vancouver, during the upcoming Clark County Open Studios guided tour weekend. Anderson is one of 55 artists, in 51 locations that range from Vancouver to Ridgefield to Battle Ground and east county, who will open their studio doors and welcome the art-curious public inside for a look at their creative spaces and techniques. They’re happy to have you look around, and they’ll be even happier if you make a purchase — although that’s certainly not mandatory. The annual driving tour is free and self-guided. Tour booklets published by event sponsor Artstra, a nonprofit arts advocacy agency, are available at many local galleries and other retail and business locations — or just visit artstra.org/open-studios. The website will provide you a preview of each artist’s approach and style so you can decide whom to visit — or, click through to the interactive map of all artist addresses and build the driving tour of your choice. You are welcome to visit as few or as many as you like. All artist studios will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The Open Studios show is always juried, and a few years ago it also added a $1,000 scholarship for an emerging, young artist (age 20 to 30) in honor of the late Christine Rice, a local artist who died at age 21 in 2022. Anderson, 24, is the latest scholarship winner, and the money has paid for a new studio in her basement, which should be just about put together and ready to go in time for the Open Studios tour, she said. Constant companion Anderson and her husband share their west side home with two cats, three grinning leopard geckos and one inscrutable tortoise with a bluetooth tracking device affixed to its shell. That’s so Anderson doesn’t lose the camouflaged reptile if it manages to escape while enjoying outdoor time in the (enclosed) yard, she said. “You wouldn’t think so, but they each have their individual personality,” Anderson said of her small menagerie. (The couple also have housemates who have pets of their own, making the home menagerie even larger.) As she was growing up just north of Clark County in the Woodland and Kalama area, Anderson was constantly reminded by both family and friends that her crucial relationships with animals “didn’t matter,” she said. That insistence only led Anderson to a different conclusion, she said: “School kids are mean.” Life got even harder as Anderson’s large, complicated family lost its home during the 2008 financial crisis, she said. “The constant moving made it difficult to establish roots,” she writes in a revealing personal essay on her website. “Through every move, every new house and every school, Lacy remained the one constant in my life.” And creating Lacy’s likeness was a constant passion — and a source of solace — for the fledgling sketch artist and painter. The family moved to Vancouver and Anderson attended Columbia River High School. While school was a struggle in many ways, she said, the art classroom was where she felt at home. She credits art teacher Jason Phelps with introducing her to new subjects, techniques and materials while pushing her to develop her own philosophy of art and personal “mission statement,” she said. “You can’t just do cats all day, every day,” is what Phelps told her, Anderson recalled with a chuckle. “You’ve got cats down. Now you’ve got to work on the human form.” Although her primary subject remained animals, Anderson let her growing interest in emotion, symbolism and, yes, even human beings seep into her artworks. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted everything and caused major family and personal upheaval — including the cancellation of a student art exhibit Anderson had spent years working toward — but after profound uncertainty whether she could carry on, Anderson managed to do so. Her first gallery exhibition — if you can call it that — was at a pet shop in Newberg, Ore., where she sold everything she displayed. Anderson got married, scored a job at Vancouver’s Aurora Gallery and hosted the first public exhibition of her work there. An admirer of that exhibition asked what turned out to be a life-changing question, Anderson said: “Would you ever paint a pet portrait for me?” ‘Sense of community’ Lacy died at age 19 in early 2025. It was a devastating loss. “I swear she knew the moments I needed her most,” Anderson said. “If I had a bad day she would stick around and make me feel cared for. Pets can feel you!” The loss inspired Anderson to devote herself to a deeply soul-searching, psychological artwork about her beloved pet and her own complicated journey through life. The completed painting, “Inner Dialog,” sold for $1,500 — a jaw-dropping amount for Anderson — and it convinced her that such personal, emotional subjects strike a nerve with the many humans out there who are both art lovers and animal lovers. Since then, Anderson has created a lucrative niche for herself as a pet portraitist for hire. “I do this to foster empathy,” she said. “My goal is to bring a sense of community to people … who are told the lives of their pets are less than human lives.” While her customers usually hire her in the wake of loss, and provide photos to work from, she’s also been known to portray living pets too. “In that case I’ll do a meet-and-greet with the pet,” she said. “That does get pretty fun.” Meanwhile, Anderson continues to explore the possibilities of animal art on a broader and deeper levels: an ongoing series of animal eyes in extreme close-up, a series of “kindred souls” featuring women and animals, and a series that explores the emotions and experiences of “wild” animals that Anderson insists aren’t all that wild, scary or beyond human understanding. “Each animal is an individual living a life of its own, experiencing a world that is both unfamiliar to us and, in many ways, remarkably familiar,” she writes on her website. “I hope to encourage a deeper way of looking — to see beyond the label, beyond the species, and beyond the idea of ‘wild.’ ”

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