Toscana Studio and Gallery

Two Businesses in One Space

Toscana operates as both a working art school and a public gallery — and Ahearn will tell you the school is what kept the doors open for two decades. Toscana offers classes for both kids and adults, and the two programs couldn’t feel more different day to day. The kids’ after-school program runs three days a week and is reliably packed; summer camps have drawn as many as 170 students across three instructors at once, spread across separate sessions. Adult classes lean into painting, drawing, and sculpture, along with weekly life-drawing sessions where professional models pose for three hours at a stretch while a room full of artists’ works from life. “There’s nothing better than learning to see from something that’s right in front of you,” Ahearn says.

The business wasn’t originally built this way. It started almost by accident: Ahearn volunteered to teach a small group of elementary schoolers how to sculpt, word spread, and she began giving lessons out of her garage — until Oro Valley’s licensing rules made that impossible. A neighbor with an empty commercial unit offered it to her rent-free for four months just to see what would happen. Her first summer, she had two students. Her second summer, she had 14 and is currently averaging 70-75 students each summer. The kids’ program is, by her own account, how Toscana was truly born — the gallery came later, almost as an afterthought, when she started hanging a few pieces on the wall.

The Gallery

For years, Toscana’s gallery operated on a rented-wall-space model: outside artists paid to display their work and kept a larger cut of any sale. Ahearn also organized touring workshops with well-known visiting instructors — sometimes called “big brushes” in the art world — bringing in painters from around the country to teach intensive, multi-day sessions. Today, the model has shifted. Roughly 90 percent of what’s on the walls is now Ahearn’s own work — primarily desert landscapes painted en plein air at spots like Catalina State Park, Honey Bee Canyon, Sabino Canyon, and Gates Pass — alongside pieces from a small circle of her longtime students, her own former instructor, and a few professional artists she’s shown for years.

Original oil paintings on linen, professionally framed, generally run from about $350 for a small landscape up to $3,500 for larger pieces. Toscana doesn’t sell prints or giclée reproductions. “I like the real deal,” Ahearn says. The gallery’s reach extends well beyond walk-in traffic, too — social media has become one of her most effective sales tools, and one out-of-state collector who first discovered her work in a Tubac gallery has since purchased 51 of her paintings.

Ahearn’s sculpture work has also found its way into public spaces locally: one bronze piece, cast from a former yoga-instructor model, was commissioned for the day spa at the Hilton El Conquistador, its design built around a triangular base meant to complement the resort’s architecture.

Meet the Owner

Ahearn’s own art education began at age 12, in the back of a small art store, in an oil painting class full of women decades older than her. “I was scared to death,” she says, “but I did okay.” That early start carried her through a small Catholic girls’ high school, where she became known as the campus artist. Instead, college recruiters saw her artwork and offered her a scholarship, and she headed to a small art college in the Oakland Hills as one of only three art majors in her class.

A study-abroad program took her to Florence, Italy, during her junior year, where she lived and worked inside a 14th-century Medici palace and learned to sculpt for the first time — a discipline her college didn’t offer back home. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in oil painting, a realist working against the grain of an art world caught up in abstract expressionism at the time.

After college, Ahearn spent nearly a decade in retail, working her way up to visual display director for a chain of women’s clothing stores in the San Francisco Bay Area — dressing mannequins, building window displays, and driving a commercial vehicle loaded with mannequin parts store to store. She later moved into a director role with Macy’s, decorating stores for the holiday season, when a workplace lifting injury shattered two discs in her neck. The injury sidelined her for six years, including two surgeries and a worker’s comp case, while she raised two young children with the help of a full-time nurse. Throughout that recovery, she credits her husband for pushing her back toward art, telling her simply to “get back into it, whatever it takes.” After her family relocated to Tucson for support and a successful second surgery, she opened Toscana within the year — turning a difficult chapter into the start of a 20-year business.

Today, Ahearn splits her time between running the studio and finally prioritizing her own art practice — something she says she put off for most of Toscana’s history. For years, she didn’t hang her own work in her own gallery. “I didn’t think I was good enough,” she admits of those early years. That’s changed: her landscapes now dominate the gallery walls, and her painting output has grown steadily more prolific, done mostly en plein air across favorite spots throughout the Tucson area. Her husband, daughter Haley, and son Cole have all been part of the business at various points, and she describes their support — along with that of her siblings — as instrumental in getting Toscana off the ground.

See Her Work

This feature is accompanied by a photo slideshow of roughly 20 pieces from Toscana Studio and Gallery, captured on-site — a mix of Ahearn’s oil landscapes and her bronze sculptures. Browse through the gallery below to see the desert landscapes and figurative work that have defined her last two decades in Oro Valley.

Visit Toscana

The gallery is open to the public during regular hours four days a week, and walk-ins are always welcome — though a personal tour isn’t guaranteed during busy class times, especially during the summer camp season. More information is available at toscanastudioandgallery.com

Whether you’re looking to enroll a child in an after-school art class, take up painting as an adult, commission a custom piece, or simply browse original desert landscapes, Toscana Studio and Gallery has built its reputation over 20 years of showing up for the Oro Valley arts community — one class, one canvas, one sale at a time.

Toscana Studio & Gallery
9040 N. Oracle Road
Oro Valley, Arizona 85704
520-575-1445