BY KAREN BOSSICK

Shirley Yang Crutchfield worked on the cutting edge of technology, launching a Muses app company, following a career with Audible, Amazon, NBC and Fox.

But, while she was in the hospital bed preparing to deliver her daughter, she signed a letter of intent to sell her company, which is now owned by Braintrust.And with the birth of her son, she decided to invest in herself and return to her childhood passion for art.

She began creating art with water gilding, a meticulous, intricate process to adhere 24K gold leaf to a surface using a water-based adhesive that flourished during the Renaissance, along with other Renaissance-inspired processes like pastiglia and sgraffito.

Rose Gold

Crutchfield is showing some of her gilded, golden paintings for the first time at Sun Valley Contemporary Gallery, which recently moved to a new place in The Courtyard at 360 East Avenue in Ketchum. She will be on hand to discuss her work during the Gallery Walk from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 29.

And she will take part in an artist talk and painting session demonstrating the water gilding process from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Aug. 30. Those wishing to attend can RSVP at https://sunvalleyart.com/contact.

“I love Renaissance/Byzantine type of art that uses gold leaf, a technique that requires high craftsmanship and slow processes,” she said. “It’s a very different practice from the technology world that I came from. It’s meditative, which means I get to slow down and immerse myself in the process.

“Social media and technology today is so fast,” she added. “This makes me feel more grounded and human at the end of the day. People feel like they’re being replaced, but no machine can make this type of art. You need a human being to do it.”

Caroline Herschel

Crutchfield grew up in California’s Bay area where her parents met while her Taiwanese mother was getting her Master’s in Linguistics at Stanford University. She lived in Taiwan for six years where her entrepreneurial father had several businesses.

“Ever since I can remember, I would sit and draw. My mom said I was the easiest child to raise because she could do what she needed to do while I drew for hours. The only time I got in trouble was when I drew on the walls,” she recounted.

But her parents were not on board with her pursuing art as a career.

“My parents were first generation. They said, ‘Well, if you want to be a starving artist, go ahead,’ so I pursued an engineering major,” Crutchfield said.

Peacock

Crutchfield is a self-taught artist. Her work, which has won multiple international art prizes, focuses on fashion and the portrayal of strong female figures.

“I’m bringing Sun Valley Contemporary a series on strong females in fashion,” she said. “It involves a lot of gold leaf work with oil paint. A lot of details. It speaks to the fact that everything that looks glamourous on the outside takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears and perseverance underneath.

“It’s a tribute to all the women who have worked very hard to attain success, who put in the hard work behind the scenes. I want them to be seen and I want them to feel seen.”

One of the women Crutchfield painted was the lead ballerina in a “Swan Lake” ballet.

Gold sleeve

“Imagine how much practice, how much dedication, it took for her to become the lead role,” she said. “The painting took me six months.”

Crutchfield makes her own raw materials, drawing on what she’s learned from master gilders around the world. She cooks up rabbit skin glue, calcium carbonate and distilled water to create gesso.

She applies as many as 14 layers of gesso on top of a birchwood panel. It’s so thick that some of her paintings take on a 3D appearance. She puts a little clay on top of the gesso, sanding it down after letting it dry. Then she burnishes the clay.

“It takes several days,” she said. “All of this prepping and I haven’t painted anything yet! By the time I’ve finished prepping, there’s kind of sanctity about it. Then I sketch the subject and lay down the gold leaf.”

Crutchfield experiments a lot, as even humidity and air quality or air temperature of Chicago where she now lives can impact the process. She keeps the temperature in her third-floor studio at 71 degrees, and she uses a humidifier and portable refrigerators for the raw materials.

“I had to do the entire painting of the ballerina twice. That just reminds me that, when you  want something to look beautiful and perfect, there’s so much that goes underneath that knows no one knows about.”

Water gilding was actually invented by the Egyptians, Crutchfield said.

“They used to gild the tops of pyramids with gold because the tops were closest to their gods. The Byzantines began using it in the 11th and 12 century, and Renaissance artists used it in the 13th and 14th only in paintings when painting deities and royalty.”

Crutchfield will show those attending her demonstration on Saturday how to use a brush called a gilder’s tip, along with a gilder’s knife and pad.

“I will focus on the gold leaf, which comes from Florence, Italy, because I think that’s the most interesting,” she said. “I might do a side-by-side real gold versus fake gold so people can see how differentiate when someone’s using real 24 karat gold versus imitation.”