(editor's note: Thanks to Rick Silverman for the title)Telluride's annual KOTO duck race had it all: the spirit of competition, winners, losers, dedicated duck wranglers, ducks stranded by circumstances beyond their control, willing assistance by friendly bystanders (by-waders?), a cheering section waiting anxiously at the...
Artist Bruce Gomez is the poster boy for the second year in a row for the Telluride Chamber Music Festival, this weekend, August 7 – August 8 and next weekend, August 14 – August 15.On Friday, August 14, 12 – 2 p.m. and Sunday, August 16, 10a.m. – 1 p.m., Gomez will be in the Great Room, at the Peaks Hotel, working at his easel, developing new paintings.
Johannes Brahms is the alpha and omega of the 36th annual Telluride Chamber Music Festival. The event opens on Friday, August 7, with Brahms closing the first big evening. The final concert, Saturday, August 15, is dominated by Brahms. In between, the venerable Festival, among the three oldest on Telluride's cultural calendar, celebrates two big birthdays: Felix Mendelssohn was born February 3, 1809, just a few days before Abraham Lincoln.Born to a poor but musical family in the slums of Hamburg, Germany, Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897), studied music as best he could, supporting himself by playing piano at bars and brothels and by turning out arrangements of light music. Eventually Brahms grew to become the brick of classicism in his country. His compositions showed no traces of extraneous – nonmusical – allusions, yet they resonated with strong personal statements. In chamber music circles, Brahms is the go-to guy if you really want to test your mettle and strut your stuff: often just a smattering of notes conveys a universe of emotion. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Photographer Maggie Taylor's technically brilliant, unapologetically enigmatic digital photographs throw the viewer slightly off balance, like the work of her husband and fellow photographer, Jerry Uelsmann. The couple, who appear to be on the same wavelength, are featured on a double bill at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art. Their show opens Thursday, August 6, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. with an artists' reception to coincide with the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities' First Thursday Art Walk.
Like Uelsmann, Taylor's renown is international. A major retrospective of her work is currently on display at Centro Internazionale di Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy. Also like Uelsmann, Taylor is all about altering the world as we know it in visually interesting ways: the result, at once playful and scary.
Telluride county commissioner Elaine Fischer is about to deliver the full monty to her constituency: a show of self-portraits that bare her soul opens on Thursday, August 6, at the Stronghouse Studios, part of the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanties' First Thursday Art Walk, an all-day showcase of the best of Telluride's fine art and retail scene. Venues are open late until eight.
Elaine Fischer arrived in town in the 1980s. Fast forward nearly 30 years, Elaine is a high profile and highly respected member of the community known mostly for her government and nonprofit work: HARC, town council, mayor, and today, county commissioner. Two years ago, however, Elaine decided to return to her roots in fine art and start painting again – and it was a long time coming.
[double click to view in larger format]
Over the past week, Telluride Inside... and Out has been running a series of podcasts featuring commentary by renowned photographer Jerry Uelsmann about five of his mind-bending images. A show of his work begins today, August 6, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m., with an artist reception at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art on Main Street.
Uelsmann's opening is part of the First Thursday Art Walk, an all-day showcase of Telluride's fine art and retail scene created by the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities. Venues are open late until eight.
Jerry Uelsmann began producing his dramatic photomontages in the 1960s, black-and-white images that are not at all black and white, rather unsettling alternatives to naturalism. These surrealistic, hyper, super or anti realities – call them what you like, the labels are just variations on a theme – amount to a psychic topography developed from things that happened at the fringes of Uelsmann's consciousness. Clues to the meaning of the work, however, could be derived from artist's symbolic vocabulary, which has remained surprisingly consistent over the years: nature and culture cross boundaries when interiors meld with exterior landscapes. Figures levitate and fly as in dreams, free of gravity. Monumental hands, a classic element in Surrealist photography of the 1920s and 1930s, appear everywhere. Other bizarre, even grotesque Surrealist motifs include disembodied human parts, humans merging with trees, rocks and water, animal, vegetable and mineral blending and intertwining, the stuff of the shadow world. Universal archetypes such as house, tree, sky and water, are all re-contextualized, forcing us to confront them like children, with wonder and for the first time.
“COWBOY TALES OF A WEST END COWBOY”
The Telluride Historical Museum's Fireside Chat series continues this Thursday, August 6, at the Fire Pit in Telluride's Mountain Village with "Cowboy Tales of a West End Cowboy", featuring guest speaker and author, Howard Greager. Greager was born into a cowboy family and continued the tradition for a good portion of his life. Howard Greager was a cowpuncher in many western states but his home has always been on the western slope. In his travels as a cowboy he met many a character and his stories are both funny and poignant.
[click "Play" button for a discussion of one Uelsmann image] Telluride Gallery of Fine Art will host an exhibition of works by Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor from August 6 to September 6, 2009. The opening is Thursday, August 6, from 5:30-7:30 pm at the...
For three days, Friday, August 7 – Sunday, August 9, visiting artist Greg Barnes teaches a course in plein air (in the open air) pastel techniques at Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts, walking students step-by-step through the process that begins with selecting a subject and ends with a finished product. The intensive also includes show and tell: Barnes plans to demonstrate the techniques he teaches and offer theories about color, composition and value, which become the grammar underlying future work. Examples of Greg Barnes' landscapes are on display at Capella outside the main ballroom on the second floor, where an artist reception is being held on Saturday, August 8, 5:30 - 7 p.m.
Artist Susan X. Billings of mangoworkshops.com, an umbrella for artful travel, in conjunction with Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts, is offering a Bali Workshop that combines art, yoga, and Indonesian cooking, September 25 – October 2, in a tropical island setting.
Billings is the kind of protean talent who is out there to prove that all of life is art. A glimpse at one of her mixed media images tells the whole story: the work has nothing to do with '"isms" du jour or with art historians' creaky theories. It has everything to do with being an original, with a big soul and a richness of spirit.
