BY KAREN BOSSICK

Hung Liu has created a huge tapestry of paintings base on historical Chinese photographs that can best be described as “weeping realism.”

Now this painter, who grew up in revolutionary China, has shifted her attention to the Dust Bowl and Depression-era photographs of American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whom she has long admired.

Liu’s Lange-inspired works will be on display during tonight’s Gallery Walk at Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum. And, suggesting the vast scale of their migration, she has painstakingly painted scenes of an Idaho landscape marked by burned tree stumps and abandoned mail boxes that bear witness to the devastation of the 1930s in the American West.

The paintings involve mapping technique, in which paint coagulates around a web of colored lines that seem to release the energy of color like a radiant of hope from beneath the grey-tones of history.

And Liu will be able to point out more of the hidden secrets in her detailed paintings as she conducts a free Artist Chat at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 4, at the gallery.

Tonight’s Gallery Walk will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 4, at numerous galleries around Ketchum. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Gilman Contemporary, 661 Sun Valley Road—Featuring Laurie Victor Kay’s “Compositions.” These are large-scale color photographs that capture public spaces, encouraging viewers to think about how we interact and inhabit our surroundings. The photographs boast repetition and digital manipulation in The Tree series and the Metro series.

  The gallery will also feature Kelly Ording’s “New Work,” which employs simple repetition and geometric patterns of things to push the limits of minimalism and representation.

  Jill Lear, a Ketchum artist, will have a few of her works mapping the trees of Texas on display.

• The Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley Road at First Avenue, is exhibiting the works of Nicole Chesney’s “DEMIROR.”

  Chesney, whose work was recently acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, uses layers of oil on acid-etched mirrored glass to create a luminous and near-hypnotic result. Seen from one angle the painting surfaces are matte and brushy; from another, reflective and elusive. The glass reflects colors in a way that canvas and paper do not allow.

• Gail Severn Gallery, 400 1^st Ave. N., will spotlight the works of three internationally acclaimed artists in its August show, all of whom will be present to take part in free Artist Chats at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 4, at the gallery.

  Michael Gregory’s “Here and There” exhibition features some of his latest paintings of the American icons of barns, homesteads and imagined fields set against the powerful imagery of the landscape and light.

  Julie Speidel’s “Vasaros Vejas” feature sculptures in bronze, glass and stone, along with works drawn on paper. They stem  from her connection as a child with the ancient megaliths she encountered living in Europe, as well as her travels through Asia and Europe.

  Hung Liu’s “Fetching Water” paintings based on the Dust Bowl and Depression-era photographs of American photographer Dorothea Lange have a keen sense of realism.

• The Sun Valley Center for the Arts, 5^th and Washington streets, is hosting “Burchfield’s Influence: Hayley Baker, Anna Fidler, Katy Stone.” The exhibition presents the work of 20^th century artist Charles E. Burchfield who transferred his belief in a spiritualized natural world into radiant landscape paintings that shimmer with energetic line and patterns. The works of the three contempoaryartists influenced by Burchfield include that of Anna Fidler, who has created some scenes inspired by the Wood River Valley after spending time living and working in The Center’ Hailey home, which was the birthplace of the poet Ezra Pound.
• Kneeland Gallery, 271 N. 1^st Ave., will show off the works of its plein air artists, who spent this week painting their interpretations of the iconic Sun Valley Barn, Draper Preserve near Hailey and the duck pond in front of the Sun Valley Inn. The artists will have a quick draw at the Inn pond from noon to 1:30 p.m. today—Friday, Aug. 3.

This year’s plein air painters are Steven Lee Adams, Ovanes Berberian, Jack Braman, John Horejs, Shanna Kunz, Lori McNee, Caleb Meyer, Robert Moore, Silas Thompson and Bart Walker.