Fine Art

Part-time Tellurider, painter Jane Taylor, and her husband, photographer Frederic Ohringer, join a group of Hudson Valley artists featured together in a group show in Germantown, New York. Ohringer curated the exhibit at the request of ArtSpace. The opening reception is January 16.

Taylor is no stranger to Telluride collectors. Her shows at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art and at the Scott White Gallery used to sell out. Taylor's subject matter evolved over the years from abstractions suggesting worlds coming apart to the bounty of the table and garden, summarizing the arc of the artist's life. Insider poop aside, by channeling her physical experiences of the outside world, each tour de force painting became about making the commonplace look uncommonly good. Something that straddled the border between memory and metaphor, reality and illusion. Something transcendent.

Last January, TCAH's Strong Studios featured the work of newly minted local Amy Jean Boebel, a recycler with massive creative chops. "Seventeen Scrolls of Screen" featured playfully elegant sculptures created entirely from rolls of wire screen. Exactly one year later, Boebel managed to open her own gallery: Sapsucker Studios, 299 South Fir Street, where the idea is to feature cutting-edge work produced by regional artists. Sapsucker's debut show this Thursday features her own "Screen Scapes and Shapes," illuminative aluminum screen wall hangings and sculpture in which shadows complete the picture in a play of movement and light.

On December 29, the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art opens a show of new work by jeweler Cheryl Rydmark. The jeweler is renowned locally for her now famous asymmetrical arrangement of sterling silver beads, gold, leaf-like charms, and small diamonds, worn by a trend-setting group of Telluride ladies like a sorority necklace.

A classically-trained-painter-turned-metal-artist, Rydmark's creation are as elegant and harmonious as Einstein's theory of relativity, the architecture of Renzo Piano, Brancusi's sculpture, Rothko's paintings, and ancient Etruscan jewelry, works that convey the idea that, in the hands of a master, complex concepts can be successfully conveyed very simply. After 35 years on the job, Rydmark is a true master, often described as a "jeweler's jeweler" for her uncompromising quality and sensitive handling of the materials.

Brandishing her colored sticks, Strand teases the magic out of everyday objects and ordinary places/situations – train stations, restaurants, pears, a bowl of flowers, eggs, an unmade bed. The quotidian then becomes a placeholder for Strand's real subject: catching the light as it changes from moment to moment. Although her work is representational, Strand is anything but a strict realist. Look closely at her color choices: her palette is there to create a mood rather than depict what is actually in front of our eyes. In a very real sense, Strand helps her viewer see rather than simply look. Strand once told Telluride Inside...and Out: "Success to me is when you can take an ordinary head of lettuce and cause someone to give it a second glance.”