STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Hailey artist Natalie Smith lifted her painting up off the wall in her booth where it was hanging and turned it upside down. All of a sudden, Redfish Lake and Mount Heyburn came into focus.
“It’s two paintings in one,” said Smith, who is both a painter and a Sun Valley ski instructor. “Hang it one way and you see one scene; hang it another way for another perspective.”
Creativity is the order of the day this weekend at the 25th annual Ketchum Arts Festival, which continues today and Sunday, July 16, at Festival Meadows on Sun Valley Road.
The art of the 110 artists taking part is varied, including toddler capes, skull art, wild herb bug spray, henna body painting, barrel furniture, wooden snowmen and too many beautiful styles of jewelry to count.
“This festival gets better and better every year,” said jeweler Lisa Horton, who co-organized this year’s festival.
- Natalie Smith uses an array of mediums, including concrete and coffee in her work. In addition to abstract mountainscapes, and Western portraits of pack horses and buffalo, she also creates whimsical art depicting skiers and snowboarders in “Baldy Fun” and “Last Day at Baldy” that are so layered with oil paint they take on a three-dimensional quality.
“Many people commission me to put their family in the scenes,” she said. “I have paintings of Dollar Mountain, as well.”
- Isabelle Moore, who paints graphite and charcoal portraits of people and pets, is a Belgian native now living near Ketchum. She taught herself how to draw during the COVID pandemic after being diagnosed with blood cancer. She experimented with drawing boxes and spheres as she learned about shading and eventually progressed to birds and animals.
She signed up for a free three-week online portrait drawing workshop, even though she had no interest in drawing people.
“It turned out I was wrong—portrait drawing has become my passion, if not an obsession,” she said.
Moore began experimenting with different mediums, such as graphite, charcoal, pastel pencils, watercolor, oil paint and, most recently, oil pastels. And drawing became a therapy and meditation tool for her.
“My goal in portrait drawing is to capture the emotions and the soul of the subject--emotions can be read in the eyes, which is something that is not easy to transfer on paper. However, I cannot draw any random person because I choose the ones that inspire me and draw my attention,” she said.
“I mostly like drawing portraits in charcoal because of the high contrast and dramatic look it gives to the portrait. I usually ‘paint’ the portrait and background with charcoal using my fingers.”
- Andy Sewell’s brightly colored coasters featuring wildflowers, cows, fish, barns and pickup trucks caught Hailey shopper Judy Gordon’s eye: “I love the colors,” she said.
Andy Sewell grew up in Wood River Valley back in the days when sagebrush covered hillsides that condos now occupy. He studied business at Boise State University at his father’s suggestion but switched to architecture, which led to his interest in painting.
His booth at the Ketchum Arts Festival features an array of colorful paintings of Sawtooth Mountain scenes, including one of coffee on a campfire at Stanley Lake that he calls “Sawtooth Morning Brew.”
“I had my first show in 1999 at the Sun Valley Arts and Crafts Fair and it went so well I thought that maybe I could at least do this parttime,” he said. “Ten years later I went full time. I served as artist-in-residence for the Idaho Conservation League because they liked how I painted the beauty of Idaho. That enabled me to take a trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon where I had a flyrod in one hand and a camera in the other. And I’d paint en plein air in camp.”
- Ketchum glass artist Wendy Wooding is featuring some new glass works that she creates by slanting the base while the glass is still hot, allowing the colored glass to flow into the middle for a pleasing effect.
- Barbara Kline is back with a new photomontage of Sun Valley’s iconic Red Barn that features the mules that pull the Big Hitch wagons plodding in front of the barn.
- Ketchum artist Luann Holmes has created a variety of different collages using encaustic, oil and acrylic. One is a 36-by-48-inch collage in which she’s hand painted the canvas, then added images of early Sun Valley skiers from Life Magazine, along with an article about Olympic skiers training on Baldy called “Cram Camp for Skiers.”
Another, about women’s empowerment, plays off of ads blurting such questions as “Is your wife dangerous?” and “Wanted in my Maidenform bra.”
In a completely different twist, Holmes has created an eye-popping piece of art by painting circles with acrylic paint on cradleboard. She’s added slightly smaller circles to each until they reach three-dimensional shapes.
“ ‘Eye Popping’ might be a good name for it,” she said. “I guess they do resemble eyes from one point of view.”
The artwork on display captivated the imagination of Inger Satterfield: “I’m an aspiring collage artist so the collage works I’m seeing are really inspiring,” she said.
Nancy Mihal concurred, even as she handed her newest purchase to her husband to carry.
“There’s some terrific stuff at this year’s festival,” she enthused.
IF YOU GO:
The free Ketchum Arts Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, July 16, in Sun Valley’s Festival Meadows. There’s a free children’s activity tent and food vendors on site.