The Artist’s Life is a recurring feature that will shine a spotlight on the talent who help make up the rich tapestry of the Bay Area’s cultural life.

If you go to opera performances around the Bay Area, either by major companies or the smaller, scrappier outfits that dot the landscape, sooner or later you’re going to hear Philip Skinner sing.

Actually, it’s likely to be sooner, if only because it’s rare for more than a month or two to go by without this hardworking bass-baritone undertaking some new assignment on a local stage.

He’s got an array of small but important roles in his portfolio – the pompous Baron Douphol in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the villainous Don Pizarro in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” – that he brings out regularly. He’s found outlets for tackling bigger assignments such as the title role in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” which he sang for the first time two years ago with the Livermore Valley Opera.

He plunges eagerly into more offbeat assignments, creating roles in world premieres by such local composers as Allen Shearer (“Middlemarch in Spring”) and Lisa Scola Prosek (“The Lariat”). And that’s not even counting out-of-town assignments in New York, San Diego, Seattle and elsewhere.

All of which is to say that at 60, Skinner has figured out how to assemble an array of large and small engagements into a schedule that keeps him singing regularly.

“As far as how I make my living, it’s all about opera,” Skinner said during a recent break from rehearsals for Debussy’s “Pelléas and Mélisande,” which he’ll appear in next month with West Edge Opera.

“It can be tough at times but I manage to keep it going.”

It isn’t hard to understand why Skinner’s dance card stays so full. As a singer, he’s got a robust and richly colored sound, cavernous in its lower reaches and alluringly flexible on top. His stage demeanor is wily and powerful, with a keen dramatic intelligence underlying everything he does.

“Phil is a real intellectual,” says Mark Streshinsky, West Edge Opera’s general director. “There’s a lot of talking when you direct him, and an attempt to understand everything about the character. He’s a Bay Area treasure, on the level of any international talent.”

Skinner moved to the Bay Area in 1985 to participate in the Merola Opera Program and never left. He and his wife, whom he met while she was a Merola volunteer, make their home in Castro Valley. They have a daughter, 25, and a son, 23, and family concerns have played a big role in shaping his career.

“I’m thrilled, especially at this point, that I’ve been working more in the Bay Area,” he says. “It’s good to be home with them and experiencing their lives.”

As a bass-baritone, Skinner is often called on to glower villainously on stage, and he does it persuasively. When he plays Scarpia in Puccini’s “Tosca,” or Iago in Verdi’s “Otello,” the menace of the character comes through with perfect clarity.

But there’s a witty glint behind those performances, and it comes into full flower when you meet the singer face-to-face. He’s garrulous and warm, with an infectious Southern drawl; if John Goodman were an opera singer, he might well project something like the same persona.

Skinner grew up all over the South – in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and elsewhere. His father was a church musician, and music and religion both played pivotal roles in his upbringing.

“我和我的兄弟姐妹在崔总是唱歌rs, and we were expected to really belt it out. And then sometime during my teen years when I started finding my voice, I had a solo in a Christian musical – one of those really cheesy shows – and I realized this was what I wanted to do. That I wanted to sing.”

After studying music at Northwestern and Indiana University, Skinner became an Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera alongside such future stars as soprano Deborah Voigt, mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick and bass-baritone Mark Delavan. If he regrets not reaching a comparable level of international fame, he’s not letting on.

“I have a healthy degree of ambition,” he says. “But part of becoming a Pavarotti or Thomas Hampson takes a certain kind of drive, and I’m not the most driven person.”

Instead, staying busy – connecting with audiences, especially over the past ten years or so, when he says he can feel his technique getting stronger and his performances more assured – is its own reward.
“To me, the most important thing is to know that you’re delivering something that can move people and lift them up. There’s a spiritual quality to music that can connect people to something bigger and deeper than themselves.

“You know, I was raised with the thought that I want to live my life to glorify God. And in a certain weird, mystical way, I still feel that. The goal is still to be the best that I can be in this universe, this mystery, that we’re all in together.”

“Pelléas and Mélisande”:8 p.m. Aug. 4- 15. $47-$125. Craneway Conference Center, 1414 Harbour Way S., Richmond. 510-841-1903.www.westedgeopera.org