BY KAREN BOSSICK

Artist Jim Caldwell’s love affair with Sun Valley started with the opening of Sun Valley Resort in December 1936—six years before he was born.

His mother--then Hannah Locke--was personal secretary to the resort’s founder Averell Harriman. A picture of the two hangs above Averell’s Bar in the Roundhouse Restaurant. And, when she married and became Hannah Caldwell, she regularly brought her brood of five children to Sun Valley to ski.

“The Warm Springs side of the mountain just had a trail through the woods with a phone at the bottom that we could call a bus to come pick us up. It was always the last run of the day—we could smell the sulfur as we crossed the bridge at the bottom,” recounted Caldwell.

“We always stayed at the Harriman Cottage, as my mother was good friends with Averell’s daughter Kathleen. “The moguls on College then were so intimidating for kids—they were bigger than us. And we rode a single-seat chairlift with a blanket to go over our legs and another to go over our top. Even when it was snowing, it was quite comfortable.”

Harriman likely met Caldwell’s mother when she competed on the first U.S. Olympic women’s ski team in the combined downhill and slalom event at the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. She hadn’t set out to be an alpine skier, Caldwell said.

She had hoped to compete in figure skating. But, at Lake Placid, she was told that the United States had plenty of figure skaters.

“So, they said, ‘Hannah, we’re going to teach you to ski,’ and they put her on the team,” Caldwell said.  “She met Hitler and all that. And she would have competed in the 1940 Olympics had it not been cancelled because of the war.

Hannah, who later became Hannah Carter, only improved her skiing as she got more miles under her skis.

“Mother skied until she was 84 and she was fiercely competitive. She was with the Old Timers group. And every year, she’d say, ‘I’m not going to do the GS this year. Then on race day she’d be there. She was the only one left in her age group so she always won the silver plate,” Caldwell said.

While Caldwell still skis at 79, he chose the path of art and architecture. After earning an art degree at  Williams College in Massachusetts, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, during which time he traveled through Europe seeing the masterpieces he had studied in class.

“I’ll never forget seeing ‘The Last Supper.’ It was such a moving experience. The composition, the poignancy of the faces Leonardo da Vinci painted…”

During this time, Caldwell developed an affinity for the stories behind the artists. He lectured on three of those artists this past week for the Sun Valley Museum of Art, giving detailed glimpses into the lives and art of artists like John Singer Sargent, whose 1883 painting of a woman with her gown strap slipping down her shoulder created a scandal in Paris.

More than a hundred people listened as he listed 15 reasons why Vincent Van Gogh could not have shot himself. Caldwell postulated that Van Gogh had been shot by a bully since Van Gogh never owned a gun, the bullet had entered the abdomen from a distance, his career was beginning to take off and his painting was robust and colorful—hardly the art of a depressed man. He had checked himself into an asylum a year earlier follow an epileptic seizure, Caldwell said, but he had written his mother that he was feeling stable.

“His style developed over just five years,” Caldwell said. “Many now consider him the father of modern art.”

After getting a Master of Architecture Degree at Yale University, Caldwell shelfed his art to manage an office full of architectural consultants. He designed his first house—a beach house he now lives in near Santa Cruz—for his father-in-law. Then, realizing how unfulfilling office work was, he went out on his own designing 40 houses over the years.

“As an architect, I notice details most don’t, such as the rock work in the chimneys in Sun Valley’s lodges,” he said. “It’s such a wonderful thing to see what (Earl) Holding did for the mountain. What a gift to put in express lifts and lodges! The bathrooms in the Pavilion with their granite are the most beautiful bathrooms in the world!”  

Caldwell began painting 35 years ago during a barge trip his father-in-law took the family on in France. He has had more than 50 solo exhibitions, and his paintings are featured in more than 450 collections worldwide.

He has painted 1,180 oil paintings of California, the Northwest, the Southwest, East Coast, Tahiti, Africa, Europe and New Zealand and what he calls “Snow Country,” in addition to portraits of horses and gardens.

“My favorite painting is the one that’s on the easel,” he said. “And I never run out of subjects. Yesterday I took a shot from Seattle Ridge looking over the fog that had crept up the Wood River Valley. What really inspires me is light—light and color. And, as we skied Seattle Ridge, the sun was hitting the fog  perfectly. You never know when you’re going to be inspired.”

While in Sun Valley, Caldwell spent his mornings eating a big bowl of oatmeal laced with nuts and fruit at Gretchen’s Restaurant before joining fraternity brothers like Jack Lane and Jim Gale for skiing.

“Those two men over there—they grew up in Portland and their parents used to put them on the train to come to Sun Valley to ski,” he and Gale pointed out two other college mates.

Caldwell builds a painting from about 10 photographs he takes of a subject, manipulating and cropping it on a monitor. He thrives on the light that shines through the finished photograph.

“Painting is mostly about light,” he said. “I tried once to paint from a printed photo and it didn’t work.”

Caldwell paints every morning from 7 to 8 in the studio adjacent to his home. He says he can’t imagine how exhausting it must have been for Van Gogh, who painted 10 hours a day.

“I paint between 40 and 50 paintings a year or, about one a week,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do everything the same way.”

COMING UP:

Jim Caldwell has taught at a variety of institutions including Stanford University and the Sun Valley Museum of Art. He will return in August 2022 to teach a painting class.