September 2008

Corinne Creel featured at Stronghouse Studios, part of First Thursday Art Walk

“Every work of art is the child of its time; often it is the mother of our emotions,” Wassily Kandinsky in “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”

Corinne Creel’s changing landscapes are little corners of creation, seen through the polished lens of her imagination and evolving temperament. Darkness brightens. Chaos organizes itself into landscapes, still abstract, but increasingly coherent and recognizable. What’s it all about? The intensely private, autobiographical element inherent in these images is instead of what actually happened in recent years.

This show of Creel’s latest work, which opened on September 4, 2008, was the centerpiece of Telluride’s traditional First Thursday Art Walk, a daylong showcase of the town’s fine art scene, including galleries and studios, which stay open late until 8 p.m. The event, the brainchild of Rene Marr, executive director of the Telluride Council on Arts & Humanities, was designed to deepen ties between Telluride’s business and cultural economies by exposing locals and visitors to emerging and established artists and the town’s retail scene

Robert Weatherford: a Telluride original

The living room that looks like a small museum is in fact the studio of local artist Robert Weatherford, a Telluride original. (He paints at the far end of the room, not shown.)

Weatherford’s legacy is expressionism, a term describing a movement in art history in which traditional ideas of naturalism and representation take a back seat to exaggerations of shape and color. The point is to communicate with some urgency the artist’s emotions.

Feeling is paramount in Weatherford’s work, and virtuosic flashes just because he can, is the enemy.

The artist tends to hang his narratives on familiar objects such as his vast collection of tchotkes (bric-a-brac), floral bouquets, and aspen leaves. However, his images are never about the objects themselves. They are about the force fields emanating from the object.

“The objects in my work are talismans that invite me to show the world what they (the objects) know. My job as an artist is to surrender to their will.”