Culture

To Fall Deeper in Love with the World     Sit with lichen longer than comfort allows.   The urge to move must rise and pass, rise and pass,...

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Spring:
Come Closer


Eager to play, spring bumbles in
like a dizzy bee
dazed by yellow exuberance
wondering which tree, which stem,
which blade of new grass to next visit.
Whirrrrr-whoosh hustles in the first hummingbird,
whip-stridently flirting with petal-some red,
sweet hussy of fling,
flippant rush of a thing,
yes! then tides of wings gather
to jostle for nectar,
warm air wears their buzz like a hymn.
And what could be better than today to remember
that we, too, are found in the rush,
this daily detour toward sweetness and thrill,
this unpredictable swerve of a path on which
evening enters on gray glimmer of wing so bright
                        that even the shadows are listening.

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.”

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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.”

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Valerie Madonia

The notion of dance in Telluride was not new before Valerie Madonia arrived on the scene.

In the 1970s, Jeri McAndrews, a New York transplant and modern dancer, settled in town and taught modern, jazz, and ballet in what is now the Elementary School cafeteria.

In 1978, McAndrews also founded the first (and only) Telluride Dance Festival.

In the 1980s, Shirley Fortenberry and Leslie Crane taught ballet to young and older. It was “Miss Shirley” who put “The Nutcracker” back in our town’s Christmas.

A little canoodling between two local nonprofits is not a bad thing – especially when considering the alternatives, such as more nail-biting over the kerfuffle on Wall Street.

The Telluride Choral Society and the Telluride Dance Academy offer a gentler, more melodic alternative to the drum roll leading up to Tuesday’s presidential election: their upcoming MasterWorks concert, “A Celebration of the Seasons,” should be a refreshing pause from the headlines in general.

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...

The mission of the National Film Preserve, the 501 C (3) umbrella corporation under which the Telluride Film Festival operates all year, is to celebrate the art of filmmaking, not the business, which pumps out and promotes easy-to-swallow audio-visual capsules.

Each year, Festival directors Tom Luddy and Gary Meyer, screen hundreds of movies to find the highest quality product about 20 – 30 features, that collectively provide a great perspective of the past, present and future of film. Documentaries are given as much prominence as features.

This year, as in years past, the 35th annual Film Festival was as educational as it was entertaining, and it was played as a contact sport – minus the teeth. On the field, almost no one is overtly mollycoddled or petted. Actors, directors, cinematographers, buffs and students walk side-by-side down Main Street and side streets of town critiquing what they have just seen. But most of the buzz comes from the lines.

Hollywood regularly spits out films featuring the kvetching narcissistic alpha males who rule Tinsel Town. “Revanche” is an indie flick whose star, Johannes Krisch, is a virtual unknown in the U.S. The talented actor is, however, a big stage star at home in Austria, which his countryman, writer/director Götz Spielmann, described as a “more of a theatre place than a movie place.”

Spielmann spoke Monday morning, September 3, at the Sheridan Opera House. He was in town all weekend for the screening of “Revanche" at the 35th annual Telluride Film Festival.

“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