[click "Play" to hear Gary Meyer talk about "the big picture"]Julie Huntsinger, Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer There are about 2500 film festival across the globe, of which about 1700 are similar to the Telluride Film Festival, still, TFF is widely regarded as in a league...
Thursday, September 3, the Telluride Council on Arts & Humanities' First Thursday Telluride Art Walk continues. Venues in downtown Telluride join forces for a cultural celebration, staying open “late ‘til 8”. The joint is jumping with stills from "Welcome Back," by Jeffrey Schers at Schilling...
The Stronghouse Studios/Gallery is home base for the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities, which sponsors the First Thursday Art Walk, when galleries, studios, and shops stay open late until 8 p.m. to strut their stuff. Many venues, Stronghouse among them, hold artists' receptions, 5 – 8 p.m. The event 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 vibrant retail scene.Stronghouse is featuring new works Corinne Scheman, landscapes, what the artist showed last year in the same venue only different. Because Corrine has changed, grown, moved on. And art is made from dreams and visions and things not known that come from within.
By Shawna Hartley
Telluride painter Nicole Finger shows her newest work at Honga’s Lotus Petal restaurant, Main Street, Telluride, starting September 3. The artist's reception is 3 - 5p.m.
Finger's portraits include local children as well as young innocents from around the globe: India, Africa and Nepal. These faces express the total lack of guile and inhibition and the complete confidence we tend to lose all to soon with the passing of years, once we learn our place in society.
Art Goodtimes, Telluride local, poet, county commissioner, fungophile, and sometime correspondent on Telluride Inside...
Telluride's summer cultural season is winding to a close as the 36th annual Telluride Film Festival officially opens for business Labor Day weekend, Friday, September 4 and runs through Monday, September 7.
Thanks to Ralph and Ricky Lauren, however, the Telluride Film Festival kicks off unofficially for passholders and nonpassholders alike today, Wednesday, September 2, and Thursday, September 3, with two free al fresco screenings at the Abel Gance Open Air Cinema in Elks Park, beginning at sunset, around 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday's film is "Hidalgo," a 2004 film made by director Joe Johnston, based on a story from 1890 about an American cowboy, Frank T. Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen), the first outsider or infidel to be invited by a wealthy Sheik (Omar Sharif) to race in the greatest long-distance horse race ever run, the "Ocean of Fire," a grueling 3,000-mile survival horse race across the Arabian Desert with the winner receiving $100,000 as prize money and the honor of being the best in the world. When the sheik's emissary approaches him, Hopkins, once a dispatch rider in the U.S. Cavalry, is working Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The race itself, held every year for the last thousand years, has only been open to the purest line of Arabian horses ever bred. Hopkins' horse, Hidalgo, a small mixed-breed mustang, was regarded as impure, and therefore not fit to run wth purebred Arabian stallions.
Did you know you had an artist living next door? Robert Weatherford is a Telluride local, an Ah Haa board member, and a painter with an international reputation. The course he teaches, "Painting from Within" is all about helping students bring their inner Picasso or Matisse to the surface. The class echos one of the founding premises of the school itself: Everyone is an artist.
Focusing on expressing what's hidden or unspoken, rather than technique, Robert believes what makes a painting speak to the painter – and the viewer – is honesty. The work should come from the soul, not the intellect. The end result are interior landscapes expressing the movement of the spirit that are still aesthetically appealing and accessible.
The Telluride Film Festival opens this weekend, September 4 – September 7. The perfect warm-up is a trip to the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art to view the work of long-time Festival photographer John Fago.Fago claims to have been born at a very young age of artist parents: dad, an animator and mom, a painter/journalist. Growing up just outside New York surrounded by creative types, Fago never once considered a real job. At college, he studied painting but switched to photography in the mid-1970s. His robust career has included extended photographic journeys to Asia and North Africa. He is currently pursuing a multi-year project in Brazil.
Tom McPhee
On Monday, August 31, Telluride's Wilkinson Public Library is really going to the dogs. Starting at noon, Second Chance Humane Society is out front, its Pet Mobile filled with animals in need of loving homes.
At 5:30, Second Chance gets to plead its cause, followed by a real life Katrina pet rescue story featuring locals Alfredo Lopez and Nancy Landau. (Bring Kleenex, a checkbook and a leash.)
At 6 p.m., the Library and the Second Chance present a screening of director Tom McPhee's award-winning "An American Opera: The Greatest Pet Rescue Ever." What could have been pessimism porn about an American tragedy turned out to be an upper about the triumph of the human spirit.
In Telluridespeak, the event is known as Mushfest. The 29th annual Mushfest, aka Telluride Mushroom Festival – billed as "the nation's oldest mycological conference exploring all things fungal" – happens this weekend, August 27 – August 30. In the context of the Telluride Mushfest, the world wide web takes on a whole other meaning: we are talking about mycelium, the sentient web of cells, which, in just one magical phase of its life cycle, fruits mushrooms. Shroom evangelists from writer Terence Kemp McKenna and avant garde composer John Cage to Paul Stamets, a Mushfest regular, filmmaker Ron Mann ("Know Your Mushrooms), and this year's special guest Gary Lincoff ("Mushroom Magick") head the list of true believers who contend fabulous fungi have the potential to save the planet.
