Your Ah Haa Moment: "Roads to Xanadu" opens First Thursday Art Walk, 7/7

05 Jul Your Ah Haa Moment: "Roads to Xanadu" opens First Thursday Art Walk, 7/7

[click “Play”, Susan speaks with Rob, Nancy and Renee]

Magical works by Craft, Schultheis & Swire

Among Telluride’s many talented writers, Rob Schultheis is an alpha male. In his columns in the Watch, and in his many books, Schultheis reclaims that turf over and over again with steady barrage of satiric, muscular, insightful, brash, bold prose.
But forget all the you know about Rob. Well, don’t forget it. Amplify it.

Did you know Rob turned down a an art scholarship to college because he wanted to live in the Rockies? Rob the writer is also Rob the painter.

“Roads to Xanadu” features the work of Rob, his wife, Nancy Craft, and their friend, Renee Swire. The show goes up in the Daniel Tucker Gallery at Telluride’s Ah Haa School for the Arts the first Thursday of the month, July 7, 5 – 7 p.m. The opening corresponds to Telluride Arts’ First Thursday Art Walk, when galleries and other venues around town stay open late to strut their stuff. ( For a list of venues and participating restaurants, go to http://telluridearts.org/?page_id=111.)

“After a long hiatus I began painting again around 15 years ago, partly to express emotions from my years covering the wars in Afghanistan that had been locked down tight for too long,”  explained Rob. “After awhile I began to create paintings from a much wider and deeper (and more positive) level of consciousness. I am hoping to eventually create a kind of composite map of another world like the one our ancestors lived in, before language, materialism and metaphysical orthodoxy imprisoned us.”

Craft started weaving in the 1970s. On a trip to Japan in 1982, she fell in love with Japanese textiles and Kyoto, where she lived for six years, studying weaving, indigo dyeing, paste resist stencil dyeing, paper making, basket arts and the like. Despite the fact Nancy’s day job became planning and leading art tours to Japan, fiber art remains a passion.

“The work for this show reflects my love of nature, expressed through abstract marks on washi paper with black and indigo inks and discharged silk organza that are inspired by Japanese, Tibetan and Arabic calligraphy,” said Nancy.

Thirty years ago, Renee turned her back on Telluride to attend the San Francisco Academy of Art. After studying shodo from a third-generation master, she returned to San Francisco to work on a masters degree in sculpture, eventually moving to Pietrasanta, Italy to concentrate on sculpting marble. When Renee began painting agin, she moved to Asia. Her mixed media works in the show were inspired by experiences living in Tibet, Thailand, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Laos and Cambodia, Buddhist societies.

“My goal in undertaking this series was to discover something new in the image of Buddha/My method was to transfer one of my photographs onto canvas. Using this as a rough guide, I followed whatever ideas were revealed or suggested as the process advanced,” explained Renee.

To learn more about this talented trio of artists and friends, click the “play” button and listen to their interview.