“Independence Pass” 25.5 in x 30 in watercolor

The Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt kicks off its summer season this weekend with a special two-day guest exhibition of watercolors by Don Nice. Titled “Views from Above”, the exhibit features art inspired by flight over the rivers and landscapes of the Roaring Fork Valley.

Nice has spent the last ten days in the area, flying and driving to high points in search of birds’ eye perspectives from which to paint. Both photographing and sketching, he has recorded “from above” compositions as the basis for colorful watercolors.

Nice completed a similar aerial view project and exhibit in Sun Valley, Idaho last year. He extended the concept to the Roaring Fork Valley at the invitation of Basalt gallery owner Ann Korologos. As a former watercolor student at Anderson Ranch under Nice’s tutelage, Ann was familiar with his work and intrigued by the idea of focusing downward on the valley artistically.

The 80-year old artist has arrived at a point in a long and ever-evolving career which he calls “the happiest time of my life with my art. Painting should be fun, a joy.  Right now, I am playing with perspective and fulfilling the obligation of every artist to break new ground.”

As Nice returns from a flight over the Maroon Bells, or a day on Independence Pass, he completes the paintings he began on-site. The collection will be shown to the public for two days, June 21 and 22. The reception for the artist is slated for Friday, June 21, from 5 to 7 pm at the Ann Korologos Galler, 211 Midland Avenue in Basalt.
For further information, please call the gallery at 927-9668.

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Andy Taylor in his Carbondale studio, with “Second Line” in progress.

When Carbondale artist Andy Taylor was growing up in Pennsylvania, he lived 15 minutes from iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth. He knew intimately the subject matter that Wyeth mined for his paintings – subsistence farms, ropes, fences, fields, sheds- the honest details of daily life. The area, which now a suburb of Philadelphia, is visually frozen in a former time by Wyeth’s enormous body of work and the intimate focus he cast on the people and objects around him.

Andy left Pennsylvania, completed an art major at Colorado College, and moved to Carbondale in the mid-1970s, sinking new roots into a place with an endless variety of landscape. He began working summers at the Strang ranch on Missouri Heights and found the balance between his art and ranch life. Within his first years in Carbondale, Taylor had begun a rhythm of drawing in pen and ink, recording the scenes he saw every day. He studied not only the big vistas, but the intimate details of the land- the grasses, the trees, the shadows.

39 years later, the sketchbooks are still in use, filed in shelves in Andy’s Carbondale studio. They are visual library of the area, renderings of the details we may barely register as we drive by. It’s hard not to compare Taylor’s methodology to Wyeth’s.

“You find it where you can,” he says with a grin, noting that many of the drawings were things he saw on a roadside and stopped to sketch. “Drawing is training, work, practice, muscle memory,” he continues. “Every artist develops a language of how to express something. It took me ten or fifteen years to make drawing useful to painting, to be able come back into the studio and paint from the sketches.”

The paintings produced are dazzling and extremely popular with local collectors, perhaps in part because they show us our everyday world in such precise line and delicious color. We know these places in our bones and they take on new life in Andy’s works.

The new pieces hung in the gallery this week include scenes from the Carbondale dog park, the banks of the Crystal at CRMS, the beloved Thompson Creek area, and other familiar local landmarks. Also included are paintings of Eastern Utah, the Colorado, Green and other western rivers – the places our area’s residents go when they leave home and wander. The gallery is awash in the expansive vistas and gumdrop colors of these large and saturated paintings.

Ann Korologos Gallery is hosting a reception for his one-man exhibit “Andy Taylor • Current Works” Friday, March 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. The Basalt Library is concurrently showing a collection of Taylor’s sketches.

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Dinah K. Worman (Best of Show winner) and Kathy Coors (Best of Show sponsor). The 2013 Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale Red Carpet Reception at the National Western Stock Show Complex in Denver, Colorado, on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013. Photo Steve Peterson/Denver Post

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“Along Walker Lane”, 9 x 12 inches, Oil on Canvas

“Up a Creek”, 14 x 11 inches, Oil on Canvas

“Huntsville Farm”, 9 x 12 inches, Oil on Canvas

“Autumn Fireworks”, 10 x 8 inches, Oil on Canvas

“Country Color”, 11 x 14 inches, Oil on Panel

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“Wall of Thunder” by Julie T. Chapman
24 x 48 inches, oil on canvas

See more of Julia T. Chapman’s art.

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