After leaving Seattle and returning to her roots in the middle of “Wyeth County,” Susan Melrath is opening the doors of her Oxford studio to the Chester County Studio Tour to help create momentum for an evolving downtown artist’s hub, writes Brian Bingaman for Ticket.

During the tour on May 21st and 22nd, close to 130 artists will be displaying and selling their artwork at 53 art studios in Chester County, and Melrath’s studio will be one of the three Oxford stops.

“I have visibility, and can teach,” she said as she presented her roomy Third Street art studio filled with large and complex abstracts painted on framed wood.

One of the classes she offers at her studio is “Courageous Painting,” which helps students approach the creative process through six key principles: design, value, color, texture, risk, and soul. For her own paintings, Melrath said that she finds inspiration in nature and unusual shapes, such as old calligraphy fonts or curves of a wooden stove.

Melrath, who previously worked as an illustrator for publishers and advertising agencies, says that the reason most of the people in her figurative paintings don’t have faces is her old job. Having to produce close to 150 illustrations with various facial features of the “Anne of Green Gables” characters was so challenging that “by the time I was done, I wanted to take a big brush and mess it all up and just get it out of my way.”

Read more about Susan Melrath at Ticket here and get more details on the Chester County Studio Tour here.