BY KAREN BOSSICK
Tina Cole looks at her watercolors hanging in the Leadville Espresso House and sees old friends.
Painted over four decades, they remind her of adventures in Mongolia Nepal, Peru and Japan.
Two of the Ketchum artist’s newest reflect the scenery she saw out the window of a rustic ski lodge built by the country’s only avalanche forecaster when she traveled to Hokkaido Japan—Japan’s acclaimed “snow country” on the northernmost of Japan’s main islands
“I was born in Japan and I go back there every so often,” she said, recounting the story of the man who has done the avalanche reports for more than 30 years. “This lodge is not for everyone—it’s very rustic, with plywood bunk beds. But it is a magical place where I stay.”
Cole and Wood River Valley plein air artist Pamela Street will show works from their travels, including Street’s travels to Mongolia France, during tonight’s Gallery Walk from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 29, at Leadville Espresso House, near Fourth and Leadville Avenue.
Theirs will be part of an engaging Christmas Gallery Walk featuring everything from aircraft and aerial photography to scenes of the Wood River Valley by such artists as G. Russell Case and Caleb Meyer.
Here are the additional highlights:
FRIESEN GALLERY, Sun Valley Road at First Avenue, is showcasing the work of FEI DISBROW, who is making her debut at the gallery with an exhibition titled “Beginning with Absence” that explores the transient nature of existence. Her intelligent mixed-media works explore the concepts of object and void, each component carefully crafted and meticulously placed resulting in perfectly balanced but minimalist compositions.
Disbrow, who attended Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon before receiving her MFA from Cranbrook Art Academy in Michigan, has had her work exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and Canada. She has been an artist-in-residence at Banff Centre of the Arts and she received several grants awards including the MST Bronze Award for Emerging Sculptors at the Canadian Sculpture Centre.
Friesen Gallery is also showcasing new photographs by BARBARA VAUGHN, who has long been fascinated by water’s ability to reflect and distort.
Both Vaughn and Disbrow will be present during the Gallery Walk reception.
GILMAN CONTEMPORARY, 661 Sun Valley Road, is hosting an exhibition that should be of interest even to young children. That would be JEFFREY MILSTEIN’S aircraft and aerial photographs, part of an Aircraft series recently exhibited at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Milstein, a photographer, architect, graphic designer and pilot, captures such aircraft as the Bombardier Challenger 604 and Alaska Airlines Disney Boeing 737-400 from below as they descend and are exactly perpendicular to the camera’s frames, revealing the complexity and beauty of the machines..
At the same time his Aerial series, also being shown for the first time in Sun Valley, reveals striking images of Los Angeles and New York. He leaned out of helicopters to capture bird’s eye shots of the cities and landmarks revealing patterns from a point of view rarely seen.
Gilman is also exhibiting works by JAMES VERBICKY, who creates media paintings made of Baltic birch wood covered in vintage advertisements and imagery, and works by JAMES AUSTIN MURRAY, who uses ivory black oil paint to create pure black paintings that ripple and pulse, creating the illusion of movement. Also photographs by the late RODNEY SMITH, not previously exhibited.
KNEELAND GALLERY, 271 First Avenue North, is showcasing the works of CALEB MEYER, a Wood River Valley artist, as well as a debut exhibition by plein air painter ERIC JACOBSEN and JEAN RICHARDSON’S large-scale acrylic on canvas paintings that use the image of a horse as a metaphor for the human spirit—unbridled, striving restless and sometimes heroic.
Meyer served a two-year apprenticeship under nationally recognized artist Robert Moore, who is also represented by Kneeland, followed by an art teaching career. Now an established artist in his own right, he provides viewers with a fresh look at nature—and a number of iconic Ketchum landmarks--through thick paint, vibrant color and unique compositions.
Jacobsen, who grew up in New England paints everything from the maritime seascapes of his hometown to the rugged landscape of the Northwest he now calls home.
All the artists will be in attendance.
HARVEY ART PROJECTS USA, 659 Sun Valley Road, is celebrating the opening of its new gallery space with “Nyuyuntjaku—Keeping the Fire Alive.” The exhibition features ceramics and paintings from senior and emerging artists from ERNABELLA in northern South Australia. Ernabella is Australia’s oldest indigenous art center.
GAIL SEVERN GALLERY, 400 First Avenue North, is showcasing the tapestried taxidermy of PAMELA DETUNCQ and DAVID DEVILLIER’S new exhibit “Women Who Know.” It is also hosting PREVIEW 2018, a group exhibition featuring artists who will have exhibitions at the gallery in 2018.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE CENTER, 471 Washington Ave., will feature local photographer KAT CANNELL’S exhibit entitled “Large Landscapes with a Micro Focus.”
Cannell created the exhibit after witnessing an increase in trash left along the trails and around the campsites of high alpine lakes in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA).
The exhibit includes collections of the micro-trash she collected, as well as stunning photographs of the surrounding landscapes. It will be up in the office through mid-January.
In addition the ERC will have information on its Recycling Outreach and Action program.
BROSCHOFSKY GALLERIES, 360 East Avenue, will feature a Best of the West group show featuring historical and contemporary interpretations of the American West.
FREDERIC BOLOIX FINE ARTS, 351 Leadville Avenue in the Galleria Building, will feature “The Art of the Portrait” featuring portraiture from artists like Emile Lahner, Martin C. Herbst, Salustiano and Andy Warhol.
SUN VALLEY CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Fifth and Washington, is displaying its exhibit featuring art, blueprints and even furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright and Archie Teater, Idaho’s most prolific painter and the original owner of the only Frank Lloyd Wright home in Idaho.
WOOD RIVER FINE ARTS, 360 East Avenue in The Courtyard, is featuring work by G. RUSSELL CASE showcasing landscapes of Sun Valley in an exhibition titled “Wood River Serenade.” The exhibition will also feature Case’s paintings of the canyonlands of southern Utah and Arizona.
LIPTON FINE ARTS, 4th and Leadville Avenue, is showcasing Rookwood Pottery and other vases and furniture from the AMERICAN ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT dating from 1880 to 1940.
The gallery will also feature TORI GAGNE’s Art of Equus Contemporary Photographs, which convey the power, motion and beauty of the horse Gagne will be in attendance to discuss her series, “Moonlit Dance,” which depicts the horse in an unusual world of dreams and magic. She created the works at a wild horse sanctuary in Santa Barbara, Calif., barns in her native state of Minnesota, at stud farms in Italy and in the Carmargue region of France where she photographed sturdy white horses that live in the marshy delta of the Rhone River.
“The horse lives in a highly intuitive world of the senses, a world we don’t often access as humans,” said Gagne who donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of her work to organizations that protect wild horses in the United States. “To enter their world, you must be calm, centered and free of tension.”
MOUNTAIN IMAGES GALLERY, 360 East Avenue in the Courtyard, features the amazing local landscape photographs of JAMES BOURRET, as well as photography by JERRY HADAM and DIANA CITRET.
MESH GALLERY, 4th and Leadville streets, is featuring photographs of nearby mountain ranges, including the Lemhi, by JEFFREY LUBECK, TESSA SHEEHAN, TORY TAGLIO and ED CANNADY.
STONE ART GALLERY, in the Walnut Avenue shopping mall, is featuring the stonework and crystals of stonemason/artisan JEFF HOMCHICK.
KETCHUM INNOVATION CENTER, 311 First Ave., is featuring a one-night-only, pop-up gallery featuring works curated by Portland, Ore., Gallery owner Rudi Broschofky. The exhibition, “Flat Blak,” focuses on the urban contemporary art of street artist Ben Eine, New York artist Elizabeth Waggett and mural painters form London and Australia.