04 Jan Telluride Arts: First Thursday Art Walk of 2016
Telluride Arts presents the first First Thursday Art Walk of the winter 2016 season. Celebration of local talent takes place Thursday, January 4. A free Art Walk map offers a self-guided tour that can be used at any time to find galleries that are open most days. Listen to Open Art Radio on KOTO from 12-1 p.m. on first Thursdays to hear interviews with the artists. Maps and gallery guides are available at participating venues and at the Telluride Arts offices located in the Stronghouse Studios + Gallery at 283 South Fir Street.
Rob Schultheis is the author of six books, including “The Hidden West” and “Fool’s Gold, the latter about the changing face of his home town, Telluride, Colorado.
Happy Woman, Rob Schultheis
Since 1984, Rob has covered the wars in Afghanistan for Time magazine and other periodicals, also freelancing as cameraman for the networks. Over the years, he has written for The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Outside.
Rob’s prose is bold, satiric, muscular, and insightful; his paintings, much the same, though more right-brained, more metaphorical, more deliberately positive and upbeat.
Yes, Rob the writer is also Rob the painter, whose signature images, gouaches, watercolors, and ink and marker, are antidotes to the “the wreckage and ruin” of the war-torn world of many of his narratives.
And unlike his hard-hitting words, these marks on the page conjure alternative universes, bright (brighter than ever these days, shining rainbows), magical realms, shambolic, shamanistic, Xanadus that lay hidden beneath surface of every bloody day.
“You might say I am endeavoring to paint a brave new world,” explained Rob.
A native Texan, Sam Levy received his BFA from the University of Maryland at College Park and his MFA in Painting from The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture.
Landscape, Sam Levy
Sam paints and draws the figure and landscape from direct observations, like the Impressionists, preferring to work with the same motif over an extended period of time. In that way, Sam discovers pathways, forms, and relationships not evident at the outset. The resulting work is an experience in time, the realization of a journey made tangible in paint, a sensual experience both seen and felt.
Sam Levy moved to New York City in 2003 and worked for the artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard as a sculptor’s assistant. He has traveled and worked in Europe and across the United States. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Homeboy Rob Schultheis and guest artist Sam Levy were featured artists at the Ah Haa School for the Arts New Year’s Eve gala. Their work remains on display in the Daniel Tucker Gallery, 300 South Townsend, and is open to public in concert with Telluride Arts’ First Thursday Art Walk, January 7, 2016, a festive celebration of the arts in downtown Telluride for art lovers, community and friends. Participating venues host receptions from 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. to introduce their new exhibits and artists.
Other Art Walk highlights:
Artist Sharon Feder is also in Vogue these days. Literally. Here’s what the high-style glossy had to say about her Telluride show:
Image, Sharon Feder
Telluride Arts District, a nonprofit that also organizes Art + Architecture Weekend in July, was established two years ago to foster the local arts scene from its Stronghouse HQ on South Fir Street. Set across the way, Gallery 81435 is one of its many projects and the best place in town to catch contemporary art. Denver artist Sharon Feder’s exhibition “Δt,” which explores the concept of “sameness” through geometric paintings of unknown-yet-familiar cookie-cutter gas stations, Target stores, and 7-Elevens, will run through January.
(Continue reading Vogue riff on Telluride here.)
On Art Walk eve, Sharon will be leading an engaging talk about her work beginning at 7 p.m.
Sharon’s exhibition, titled Δ t (delta t = Change in Time) contemplates the geometry and emptiness of structures, visually and metaphorically. Like silent sentries, they record, observe, and imply change in time. As elements in the gigantic still-life constructions that form our urban environments, buildings inform an understanding of and unity with the man-made and natural world.
The paintings themselves occupy a space at the nexus of realism, abstraction, and surrealism.
“(Feder’s paintings) are more about color combinations… and how paint is applied than subject matter… at once an aesthetic expression and a spiritual engagement.” wrote Simone Kussatz, in ArtScene.
Gallery 81435 exhibit, work of Sharon Feder
A third-generation Coloradoan, Sharon began studying painting as a child, then went on to work with Colorado modernists Ed Marecak and Mark Zamantakis; at the University of Washington in Seattle with Norman Lundin and Michael Spafford; and then, with Bob Froese of Ouray and Montrose in the 1980s.
Her work is also enriched and informed by decades of technical experience as a set designer, muralist, and sign artist, along with a life passionately lived as a mother, mate, and student of nature.
Sharon’s paintings and murals are included in numerous corporate, private and public collections.
(Sharon Feder show runs through the month of January at Gallery 81435, located at 230 S Fir Street in Telluride, Colorado. Open daily from 12-6pm or by appointment at 970-728-3930.)
Telluride Arts’s Stronghouse Gallery presents Warehouse Sessions, a juried series of photographs, paintings, and artifacts that document the historic Telluride Transfer Warehouse in its current raw state as seen through the eyes of locals and visitors.
Image, Sam Stevens
Photographs by Alice Flitter, Aurelie Slegers, Amy Levek, Sam Stevens, and Shasheen Shah will be on display, along with paintings by David Brankley, Joanne Kauflin, and Elizabeth Simpson, and artifacts from the building itself.
Warehouse Sessions exhibits the dynamic history of the Transfer Warehouse, which began life as a livery barn during the town’s mining days, into the the idle and roof-less present day before its restoration and renewal as a center for the arts.
Image by Telluride Art’s Moly Perrault. (Not printed for the show, but available online.)
(The Stronghouse Gallery is located at 283 S Fir Street and is open daily from 12-6pm or by appointment. The show runs through the month of January.)
The work of iconic photographer Dan Budnik remains on display at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, 130 East Colorado Avenue.
Willem De Kooning
Right after WWII, New York City, no longer Paris, became the center of the art world, and a (largely) boy’s club known as the Abstract Expressionists became superstars: Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning, Jasper Johns, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, and Barnett Newman, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois were all in that elite fraternity.
Budnik (b. 1933, Long Island, NY), a heavyweight champion of portraiture, was on hand to capture those luminaries in action. His images consistently convey emotional depth, striking a delicate balance between fine art and frank humanity.
On display are 30 rare images of artists in their studios from the 1950s, when ABExers dominated. But Budnik continued to shoot through the 1970s, engaging portraits of world-famous Pop artists and Color Field painters too.
Georgia O’Keefe
A close friend of of iconic artist Georgia O’Keefe , Budnik was one of her last guests at her world-famous Ghost Ranch near Sante Fe, New Mexico. There he shot penetrating portraits of the extraordinary woman and artist who became known as the “Mother of American Modernism.”
For more about Dan Budnik, click here.
For more about other shows in the January Art Walk, click here.
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