Article by Jennifer Dempsey
Local Artist – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
SALIDA ARTIST Ross Elgin has had a successful pottery business for more than 30 years. But last month when he was called for an interview, he was more focused on the economy than his pottery line, Igneous Earth Works.
“I need to watch this bailout decision,” the 56-year-old said. “Can I call you back in half an hour?”
Article by Marcia Darnell
Local Artist – November 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
CHARLES EWING has the life. Now 60, he’s been a working (and selling) artist most of his adult life. He lives on a beautiful patch of earth, surrounded by the rolling hills and gentle mesas of Conejos County, in a large, comfortable home he’s renovated himself. He’s an inventor, sculptor, painter, and all-around creator.
Article by Shanna Lewis
Local Artist – July 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
AFTER MONTHS OF WORKING on a new home, fabric artist Grace Wever was finally back in her studio. Ready to make art, she got out her materials and tried to begin. Nothing came. Stymied, after such a long hiatus, she couldn’t get started. “I was at loose ends. I’d walk to the drawing board and walk away again,” she said. So she did something she wouldn’t normally do. Picking up her bible, she said, “Lord, I never play bible roulette, but please, give me a verse.” Opening to the powerful poetry of King David ignited a spark of inspiration for her.
Sidebar by Dianne James
Local Artist – April 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Hometown Faces
Words and music by Dianne James
There’s always part of me, left lingering behind.
Always part of that place, etched into my mind.
But dreamers find it very hard to stay,
To be tied down in time.
Article by Marcia Darnell
Local Artist – February 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
FARMWORKERS ARE GENERALLY hidden from the American consciousness. Those who labor to provide our food are invisible, except when held up as objects of pity. Artist Annette Troncoso sees them differently. Her paintings honor the farmworkers, imbuing them with pride and dignity.
Article by Cheryl Tischer
Local Artist – June 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT’S NOT THAT FAR from the manicured green neighborhoods of Ames, Iowa, to the snowkissed peaks of Chaffee County. But when measured in creative leaps and personal gains, the change in location has been an incredible journey for Carol Cartwright. For Cartwright, a photographer who moved to Salida from Ames in the winter of 2004, the distance has also unleashed a productive flow and heightened her passion for art.
Article by Rayna Bailey
Local Artist – February 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
WILDLIFE, deer, elk, rabbits, bobcats, eagles, hawks, and the landscape, forests, mountains, meadows, wildflowers, make the Wet Mountain Valley a desirable place for artists. And regardless of their preferred medium, most artists working in and around Westcliffe look out of their windows and paint or draw what they see, beautiful landscapes, wild animals, and occasionally, buffalo or cattle.
Article by Sue Snively
Local Artist – July 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT IS CALLED Temptation of St. Anthony, and at first glance it seems to be a standard landscape. Behind the sand dunes the Sangre de Cristo peaks of Crestone and Crestone Needle loom in the background, framed against a rather dramatic sky.
Article by Sue Snively
Local Artist – December 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
“As an artist, I rely on intuition, spontaneity, movement, immediacy and serendipity. What is important is to be engaging with the media at an intuitive or felt level. My work becomes a record of that process. I want my art to surprise me — to reveal to me what art is and can be, to express my humanity in ways my intellect alone is unable to conceive”
Article by Columbine Quillen
Local Artist – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
MANY AREA RESIDENTS are familiar with Peg Corthoust. She was one of the fastest skiers at Monarch’s Town Challenge Race last winter and she loves a good river trip. She always seems to be smiling and ready for a tasty conversation or a funny joke. But what a lot of people don’t know about Peg is that she is a phenomenal painter.
Article by Lynda La Rocca
Local Artist – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
AT FIRST GLANCE, the alleys separating Leadville’s weathered, wooden outbuildings from the backs of its Victorian, shotgun-style houses might seem an unlikely subject for artistic endeavors.
But in the hands of artist Robert W. “Bob” Calder, these scenes of the Cloud City at its most authentic are transformed into watercolors that lead viewers along the dusty paths of Leadville’s frontier mining heyday.
Article by Marcia Darnell
Local Artist – September 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT’S A LONG WAY from rural Kentucky to fine art galleries in the West, but Charles Frizzell has made it successfully, with style.
After earning a B.S. in Fine Arts from Murray State in Murray, Kentucky, Frizzell traveled extensively through the U.S. “looking for a place to land,” as he put it. He ended up in Cripple Creek in 1969 and moved to Central Colorado in 1994. He now lives with two dogs and six cats on 40 acres above Salida.
Article by Lynda La Rocca
Local Artist – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
The light emanating from Bill Harrington’s paintings does more than bathe his work in a rich, mellow glow. It also illuminates Leadville’s equally colorful mining heritage.
For more than 20 years, this third-generation Leadville native has helped preserve scenes of contemporary and frontier-era high country mines, mills, and railroads in meticulous, historically accurate detail.
Article by Sue Snively
Local artist – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT IS CALLED “Prayer Shawl” and it hangs in the sunlight at Gallery K on F Street in Salida. Framed in a bed-spring hung to look like a shawl, are 12 small sculptured figures of a sad, young woman. Tiny discarded feathers and a few bold birds are interwoven with the statues within the squares of the bed-spring. Delicate feathers at the dangling ends of the spring contribute to the rather soft, feminine appearance of the piece.
Article by Clint Driscoll
Local artist – February 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to walk past a Fay Golson work without stopping to look. Whether the piece is a highly textured, colorful painting of humans at work, or a photograph of an abandoned shack in a blizzard, or a photogram featuring the demon form of Kali among everyday objects, the work requires examination and a reaction. That phenomenon has established the reputation of this Chaffee County artist as a painter, maker of mixed-media pieces, and a very creative photographer.
Article by Rayna Bailey
Local artist – October 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
WESTCLIFFE ARTIST Sarah Woods is an admitted conservative from a family of conventional teachers and lawyers. There may not be a “Bohemian” actor, musician, or artist in the entire clan. Except for Sarah.
Woods started out following in the family’s footsteps. She graduated from the University of Wyoming with a bachelor of fine arts degree, and says that although the university’s fine art program was highly specialized and open only to a limited number of students, it failed to teach participating students “the business of art,” or how to make a career as a professional artist.
Article by Ed Quillen
Local artist – June 2001 – Colorado Central Magazineo Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
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AS A STUDIO, the back room at 150 West First Street _in Salida looks more like the village smithy’s shop — massive antique anvils of horseshoe-forging dimensions, bench vices that could hold a car transmission, scores of punches and dies, extruders that form wire from solid metal ingots, pedal-powered hammers, and a panoply of other tools for shaping metal.
Article by Clint Driscoll
Local Artist – April 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
TO OBSERVE A WORK by Judé Silva is to get lost in the intricacies of the piece and in the reveries it invokes. A stole made of intricately twined red willow and aspen hangs from a horizontal pole — inviting comparison to a Japanese silk kimono. A natural fiber, hand-knotted net gently supports a spray of red willow. Does the artist hope to preserve natural things or to elicit the gentle remembrance of a moment in time?
Article by Clint Driscoll
Local artist – January 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE AVERAGE PERSON would not assume a man driving an older model Ford pickup with a Trout Unlimited decal and a prominently displayed “No Whining” bumper sticker would have the soul of an artist; but assumptions are often wrong. Over the past decade Robert “Bob” Gray has established his reputation as the finest creator of turned wood objects d’art in the region. He has spent hours bouncing over back roads in his Ford searching for windfall or beaver-cut aspen trees which provide the raw material for his work.
Article by Ed Quillen
Local artist – December 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
MARTY MITCHELL lives, paints, and draws in Saguache. But she grew up in Iowa, and she says that explains the unusual shape of her paintings: in a world of rectangular art, her works are square, just like the grid of section-line roads that defines the agricultural Midwest.
Article by Nancy Ward
Local Artist – December 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
SEAN GUERRERO’S artistic creations are larger than life.
It might be said they “litter” the countryside from coast to coast, since they’re made from articles discarded by civilization as it embraces newer things. But Guerrero’s art definitely is not “garbage.” Guerrero recycles chrome bumpers and other unwanted metals from vintage cars parked and long-forgotten in pastures, back alleys and junkyards in the Southwest and Midwest, and turns them into sculptures too large to be hidden away in exquisite homes or exclusive galleries.
Article by Marcia Darnell
Local Artist – September 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Some things can’t be repressed — like talent.
Sandi Patterson took a 35-year hiatus from art to raise a family in Brighton. Then she and her husband, Cart, retired to Crestone.
“Coming down here and the whole change of lifestyle is so peaceful,” she says. “I didn’t do any artwork for 35 years, but I picked it up again down here.”
Article by Ed Quillen
Local Artist – November 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
by Ed Quillen
Within recent memory, Salida was pretty much a lunch-bucket town. When the blue-collar jobs faded with the closure of nearby quarries and mines, so did a goodly part of downtown, with empty storefronts spread along First Street.
But Salida’s downtown now thrives with studios and galleries, among them Soho — the name of a London bohemian district, the arty South of Houston area in New York City, and since this June, one place to find work by Marcy Miata.
Article by Sharon K. Chickering
Local Artist – July 1997 – Colorado Central Magazin
Art and Mary DuPont sit at a round table in a corner of their southern-facing, second-story front room, sun pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows which command views of Leadville and the Sawatch Range. Bright red and yellow/orange tomatoes hang from potted plants on the floor.
Article by Peter Burton
Local Artists – December 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
“Every time I drove from Buenie back to Dallas, it got harder and harder. ”
This is how Ron Adair, postage stamp designer, expressed his answer to my question: What caused you to move here? We were sitting in Ron’s office-studio in Buena Vista.
