Telluride’s Galleries Show Art From Around-the-World

TELLURIDE – The First Thursday Telluride Art Walk continues its monthly tradition tonight, with guest appearances from Pastel Society of America Hall of Fame honoree Sally Strand (whose solo exhibition, “Across the Day,” featuring 12 new oil paintings and pastels, opens tonight at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, on main street, 5:30-7:30 p.m.) and Greg Barnes, a three-time attendee at the summertime Mountain Village Culinary Arts Festival, here with new work at East Meets West Gallery, on east Pacific Ave. Barnes, who has a devoted Telluride region following, will exhibit his new 36-by-40-inch painting of main street, with Ajax Mountain looming in the background, painted from a 6-b-y-8-inch “small study” the artist did in August.

If Sally Strand’s work looks familiar, it’s possibly because of two previous solo shows here as well as her Telluride Wine Festival poster (2006); more recent pieces are on display, including “Rush Hour,” and other oils on canvas.

A Colorado native now living in California, Strand has exhibited professionally for three decades now. “I am captivated by light, and my interest in light is on equal terms with the content of a painting,” says Strand, whose multi-layered surfaces, assembled in a rich complexity of form and color, seem to emanate light from within.

Strand, whose artwork illuminates the familiar – a man reading a morning newspaper; light falling across a bowl of eggs; groups of people waiting, working, playing – was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007, the highest commendation offered by the Pastel Society of America.

A wine-tasting from Colorado’s Sutcliffe Vineyards will be held at the Strand opening.

Greg Barnes, whose work is on display at East Meets West Gallery, on the south side of Pacific Ave., a half-block away from the Telluride Post Office, prefers painting in situ. “Basically, I paint wherever I am,” says the Charlotte, N.C. artist, just in from a drive halfway across the country from home. “When I go to paint, I look for what strikes me, what captures my eye at that moment. Sometimes the painting ends up being totally different from the scene, but most of the time, it is of the scene, with some kind of spirit coming through.”

East Meets West is also displaying the work of Karen Kristin, a multifaceted artist whose Cortez, Colo.-headquartered company, Sky Art, has painted ceiling and wall murals all over the world, from the Forum Shops and Caesars in Las Vegas to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History to Victory Church, in Westminster, Colo., and the Chaitanya Joti Museum, in India.

Kristin, who paints everything from symbolic pieces to portraits to landscapes to skies, moved from her native Los Angeles, Calif., to northern New Mexico; her landscapes and sky and animal paintings are evocative and familiar to viewers who love the American Southwest.

At the Amy Schilling Studio Gallery, pieces by Baghdad, Iraq-born artist Reem Rahim’s four-part series of ballerinas – inspired by the ballerinas of Degas, the artist says, but with an array of complex modern emotions expressed in the features of each one – is on display. “I began this series of ballerinas after a period of not painting and wanting to pick up a brush again and play,” the artist says. “They are studies on Degas, painted on old journal entries, that have been pasted on board and painted over with a whirl of abstract ground.

“While I began them as quick sketches of free-flowing marks, they turned into a deliberation of gestures and expressions of my personal psyche over the past year. Believing that painting always reflects your inner rumblings and unconscious, I have debated with myself what they may implicate,” Rahim writes. Are they “a response to the prognosis my doctor gave me over 20 years ago after a near fatal car accident which almost took my legs?” along the lines of ‘Let’s put it this way, you will never become a ballerina?”

Rahim, who will visit Telluride later this year, is also exhibiting some of her oil-on-tin paintings she describes as “small vignettes, many inspired by my brother and co-founder’s photos” that adorn boxes of Numi Organic Tea, a business she started “with my brother in a 750-square-foot apartment” in Oakland, Calif., more than a decade ago, that now boasts 35 employees, a 30,000 square-foot facility in Oakland (that includes a retail tea-house), and worldwide product distribution. Teas from Numi, a leader in green sustainable practices, will be served at the Schilling Gallery, on Pine St., just south of main street.

Next-door at Lustre, an Artisan Gallery, check out the trunk show of jewelry from Gurhan, the self-taught Turkish master-goldsmith designer who works exclusively in 24k gold.

And further west, on south Fir St., Stronghouse Studios feature Telluride artist Amy Jean Boebel’s Seventeen Scrolls of Screen; at Dolce Jewels, new pieces by California jewelry artist Alan Friedman are on display.

ArtWalk is sponsored by the Telluride Council on the Arts and Humanities; pick up a free brochure at participating venues, or visit the TCAH website at www.telluridearts.org.