Posted on Wed, May 13, 2009
Rock River Artists announce the 2009 studio tour
Saturday and Sunday, July 18 and 19
Take advantage of the 3-Day weekend Super Saver or other Packages and combine your tour with the dining and hospitality of the quintessentially New England Four Columns Inn
The self-guided tour begins in picturesque South Newfane, Vermont.
Maps to individual artists’ studios will be available at The Four Columns and at The Old Schoolhouse in South Newfane.
The 17th Rock River Studio Tour offers a quintessential Vermont summer getaway. Anyone who has done Rock River knows the tour is different every time, and many people regularly plan their summer travels around the July event
The breathtaking art produced in this valley burgeons in the fertile fields of a sublime landscape. Within minutes of beginning the tour, one may see a sunny pasture overcome with daylilies, a cool forest fragrant with fallen hemlock needles, a 200-year-old barn still in use on a family farm, a dirt road that winds up a steep slope through a quaint old wood, and a covered bridge that crosses a clattery, shimmering river. It’s worth coming to Rock River just for the chance to take the many roads less traveled by.
But for most visitors, the draw of Rock River is the unique alchemy that results when you have 15 world-class artists showing their work within a 12-mile radius. When these artists open their homes, gardens and studios to the public for the weekend, 
the experience is comfortably intimate. Though this is a tour, participants are not treated like tourists: everyone is invited in as a back-door neighbor. And while the tour includes many artists whose works regularly appear in big-name galleries and museum collections, that is not the point here. A museum visit resembles Rock River the way a display of stuffed lions resembles a safari. The art in its native habitat, much of it in progress, still pulses with the ideas, emotions and other mysterious forces that originally called it into being.
For more information about the tour visit the Rock River Artist website.