CAPTURING STORIES THROUGH ART IN PARK CITY
It might have all started with the Gold Rush and silver mining exploration, the promise of wide open spaces or the lure of the cowboy’s life out West. The dreams of prosperity have been many and varied, as have artists’ translations over the centuries. In and around Park City, there’s never a lack of avid adventure, boundless discovery and awe-inspiring examples of artists’ passions for their beloved West.
UNEARTHING HIDDEN TREASURES
Gallery MAR | Sarah Winkler
Inspired by the beauty and traditions of Park City’s silver mining history, Winkler’s latest show, “Mountain Glow” centered around her theme of the mountain’s extraordinary hidden treasures. Winkler often embeds minerals into her paintings to provide little moments of surprise for her viewers. She explains that she likes to do this for her viewers to experience part of the wonder and intrigue of exploration of the natural environment. Melding together her talents for both abstract and realistic interpretation, her striking paintings feel at once reflective and peaceful, while energizing and powerful at the same time. Using metallic paints and mika pigments, her new series reveals reverential themes of discovery and appreciation in the West’s vast and diverse natural beauty.
CAPTIVE STORYTELLING
Thomas Anthony Gallery | Carrie Fell
Cowboys, cowgirls and horses abound, but her fascinating use of dazzling, dancing color and line sets Fell’s work apart from more traditional Western paintings. Skillfully crafting captivating positive and negative spaces with acrylics and oil washes, she leads her viewers into uncharted territories filled with wonder and excitement. Fell explains that she keeps her portraits faceless to depict the mythology surrounding Western life, as she paints to reflect its genuine beauty and soul. Her work carries an incredible ability to chronicle an impassioned visual journey narrated by her magical shapes and light of the West.
DISCOVERING CONNECTION
Trove Gallery | Debra Fritts
Allowing the earth to feed her information to inspire her works of sculpture is how Fritts describes her artistic process. She explains that she spent hours playing in the mud as a child and still relies on her deep and motivating connection to the earth today. Fritts works intuitively from pounds of wet red clay as her forms and stories evolve and transform. Using thick coils, her captivating sculptures are hand-built and fired three to five times depending on the color and surface she’s looking for. She approaches her beautiful use of color on the clay as a painter, using a transformative combination of oxides, slips, underglazes and glazes giving her sculptures a natural, earthy spontaneity and appeal.
FINDING REFUGE
A Gallery | Royden Card
Card reports that drawing and then painting the desert landscape has now been his primary focus for over 50 years. Though he reveres the more typical scenes of slick rocks and towering red cliffs, he also seeks out the lesser-known views that can often get overlooked. He describes his long-lasting motivation as a combination of love of the desert, refuge, contemplation, and an ongoing search for beauty. His alluring oil paintings and woodcuts of the landscape clearly reveal a lifelong reverence and love affair with the West.
COLORFUL TRADITIONS
Meyer Gallery | Seven Nielson
If you listen closely, you’re almost sure to hear the crickets chirping or the wind howling as his colorful characters fill you in on the latest news. With alluring shapes and spaces, Nielson draws his viewers back to the area’s deepest roots. Although the small mining town of Garfield, Utah where the artist was born no longer exists, the artist’s fascination with the mysteries of the West never waned. His deep connection to the people and landscape of the West is certain as his inviting oil paintings intrigue with luscious brush strokes and warm, inviting color.
SOULFUL EXPLORATION
Julie Nester Gallery | Ryan Akerley
Growing up on the mountain and skiing since age five, Akerley has long been captivated and inspired by the natural world. His exhilarating experience of competing in freestyle skiing for over a decade is clearly seen in his landscapes, as he infuses a unique sense of movement into his works. He translates his experience into fluid and dramatic brushstrokes drawing his viewers into his mystical awe of nature, capturing a moment when you can nearly feel the cool rush of mountain air on your face. Using abstract marks to create his fine details, his stimulating images construct many new worlds to explore.
AUTHENTIC TRANSLATIONS
Mountain Trails Gallery | Dan Deuter
Learning even a little about Deuter’s history reveals multiple motivations behind his zeal for authentic and emotional portraits of the Old West. He grew up on his family’s South Dakota ranch originally homesteaded in the late 1880s, where he learned to chase cattle, mend fences, hunt and fish. His life as a true cowboy, coupled with his deep interest in history, led to his respected trademark of historically accurate paintings. The youngest of six, he remembers it was the children’s responsibility to break the ponies, because in addition to cattle and horses, his family also sold Shetland ponies. But Deuter recalls, “We only half-broke the ones we liked that way no one bought them.” You often see bison, horses, mountain men, Indians and fur traders in his magnificent paintings, usually in motion, running for precious survival.
BREATHING SPACE
J GO Gallery | Sherri Belassen
Finding her original inspiration high in the sky as she flew with her father in their two-seater airplane growing up, her paintings evolved into a stunning combination of underpainting, layering and scratching of her painting surface. Belassen begins each painting with a natural, drippy underpainting, sometimes seen in the later subjects and providing even more interest to the rich, vibrant colors of the Western landscapes she showcases. Her works often feature geometric planes of color lending an almost abstract quality to her work. Showing a history of her hand in its fantastic layers, she brings her vibrant colors of the Western landscape to life.
Whether you’re a visitor or longtime lover of our breathtaking West, you don’t want to miss an opportunity to explore the vast riches waiting to be discovered in the beauty of art surrounding us in Park City.
