Fine Art

Lustre (171 South Pine), an artisan gallery, regularly showcases a distinctive collection of hand-crafted collectibles for the home and wearable art for the body: from brightly colored chandeliers and furniture made of exotic woods and inlays to the jewelry of artists such as Aaron...

[ click play button to hear]


John-Grape-450wx325h “Panache” is his middle name. A Brit by birth, John Sutcliffe’s wines are as mellifluous as his vowels, which are decidedly upper “U.” (Britspeak for Upper Class.)

John came to the USA in 1968 after serving seven years in the British Army. He graduated Reed College in 1973 before moving to New York City. Once in town, John took a big bite out of the Big Apple by successfully navigating the perilous restaurant world: first he managed the uber hip Maxwell’s Plum, then helped Warner Leroy re-open Tavern on the Green. A series of other high profile eateries followed, including two in Carolina, John’s next address in the States.

[click the play button to hear]

BHeinrich Head Shot_for print Her ice is nice and Barbara Heinrich’s award-winning baubles, bangles and beads are masterpieces of quiet elegance, not “statement pieces” that shout for attention. Bottom line: Barbara is all about enhancing the beauty of the wearer with jewelry that goes ‘round the clock and lasts for generations.

Barbara has owned and operated a workshop in upstate New York since the 1980s, where she and her assistant produce signature lines such as aspen series, inspired by Telluride and designed for the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, her local patron for the past 15 years.

Barbara returns to town for a show of her latest collection at the TGFA on December 29, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. On December 30, locals and guests are invited by appointment only to consult with the artist about a makeover for tired and heirloom pieces.

Meredith Nemirov has always painted her mind, and she is known for saying a mouthful in a few strokes – or words.

“To stand and face a whole landscape, to paint ‘en plein air’ and make a painting capturing the scene on a two-dimensional surface in a relatively short period of time is rigorous, but that’s what we artists are driven to do day after day: we interpret our world to find our place in it.”

View_from_panora1

For the last four years, Meredith has participated in the Sheridan Arts Foundation’s vetted “Plein Air” exhibition, an event that happens annually over the Fourth of July weekend. In 2007, she was chosen as one of the Top Ten Artists. Last summer, she was the winner of the “quick draw.”

Ok, maybe not Seattle exactly, but across the lake in Bellevue, last night Clint and I hooked up with part-time Telluride local and former Mountainfilm director Arlene Chester Burns at the Bellevue Art Museum. The get-together was to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of...

“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”

Img_6600Corinne 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

Img_2002The 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.”