by Barbara Torke

[Cedaredge, Colorado] If an ounce of determination makes a pound of power Tish Collins has a ton. Her creativity is packed into a small gamin package that will make the speed of light appear a coal train. A pixie hair cut, wearing her own creations and ready for the world, she makes an impression that suits her endeavors; charming, creative, and competent.
 
Tish was born in Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs. Her parents were military, her dad a Seabee with the Navy, and she moved about the coasts and islands, seeing the world with a different eye. She lived in Cuba as a teenager, Hawaii, San Diego and Texas, before marrying a Seabee herself. The family settled in the woods of Piñon Estates above Cedaredge a few years ago.  This won’t be forever. Although the climate works well for her, the Collins’ are looking at another move shortly, to facilitate the family’s growth and ambitions. Tish has no intentions of changing her goals.
 
Tish learned perseverance, flexibility, and how to experiment and study, as she traveled and moved about the country. She started working with clay when the arthritis that cripples her joints, and has kept her involved in multiple surgeries, made standing and working difficult, if not impossible. She walked with a cane and managed as well as she could until the polymer clay experience created goals and a driving interest that not only directed her creativity, but helped her focus, and get her health under as much control as she can.
 
Her workplace is immaculate and orderly. Bins of beads and tools sit on a long table with ten to twenty pieces of jewelry—necklaces, ear-rings, mirrors, and a veritable rainbow of pieces in process. None bear the label polymer clay as expected. To see her work leaves one breathless. Each mosaic piece shimmers with metallic, iridescent, or luminescent color that is hard to describe. She delights is making stones that you can’t tell are not real. Textures, patterns, colors, encrusted with light and radiance, beg to be worn, touched, and let out in the world to flicker and glow. Every piece is different and unusual. Each one has one owner somewhere. Tish will find that home-place for her work. It has to be someone who is not afraid of brilliance. It is not for the timid.
 
Tish learned to work with polymer clay by trial and error. She read, researched, went to museums and demonstrations, and just plain tried things. In 2002 she decided to make this media and her jewelry, mirrors and purses, a profession.  She sets goals which she ticks off with accurate regularity. She would have a line of work ready in a certain amount of time. Now she shows in four galleries, or by now maybe more. They are located in Cedaredge plus Durango in Colorado, Birmingham, Alabama, and Mt. Vernon, Ohio. She likes down to earth galleries, and small galleries, where her work is affordable. As she says, “Everyone should have art.” Her work gathers comments, and fans who beg for more. Tish’s next goal is to do a Las Vegas Show by next year, and pick up some more galleries. She is four years into a five year plan, and well ahead of her goals.
 
Tish first began showing her art at Main Street Gallery in Cedaredge. There she developed the skills of presentation—which she says is the ‘toughest part to market’. She struggles with organization and managing inventory and distribution. Walking into Main Street Gallery one day she realized she didn’t have the information needed. Jim Munson told her “That’s the way you are supposed to be.” His assurance that she needs to be the creative force, the other parts will follow, has eased Tish’s nervousness. She digs into her art whole-heartedly and glides effortlessly, or so it appears, with the help of the Munson’s, her family, and others who support her work.
 
Polymer clay is a relatively new media. Originally developed in Germany in 1939, for a doll-maker’s craft, it was eventually placed on the market for a children’s modeling clay. Because of its flexibility and open-ended ability to be malleable and expressive, there are no limits to what can be done. Rules are simple and techniques innumerable. It can be used to exemplify stone, glass, metal, china, fabric, and on and on. There are no limits. Many FIMO, as one brand is called, users make canes. Canes are layers and rolls of clay roped together and sliced to make smaller, more intricate slabs and decorations, such as leaves and flower buds, and ornaments. The clay is baked at low temperatures, making it durable and light.
 
Tish is more interested in manipulating the pieces to be antiqued, mellowed, stamped and molded, bringing out the design making ancient and unique appearing conglomerates of color and design. She then uses these myriad pieces to decorate mirrors, purses, clocks, and to create pendants, ear-rings and necklaces. She works on several items at a time, hiring an assistant for the beading to give her more time for designing. In a month she can create and have ready to market about 75 pair of ear-rings, seven mirrors, and ten to twenty necklaces—or more. This is with her distinct tags and information ready to display. Each outlet is anxious for more.
 
Tish and her husband have two sons who are eighteen and twenty. She has fit her studio work around home schooling and family life styles, and still keeps her goals and art active and creative. She goes to her studio, closes the door and turns on the radio. She smiles, “There are no rules.” We will be seeing a lot more of this fine designer, and her exploration of the versatile and unique moods and fine art of polymer clay.

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Kai Gallagher

by Leanne Goebel

[New Mexico]  Kai Gallagher will meet with customers and guests during the Fall Gallery Walk, September 21, 5-9 p.m. at Sorrel Sky Gallery. The gallery carries a wide selection of the New Mexico artist’s jewelry.

Kai Gallagher was wild and adventurous from the get-go. The sun infused desert, watermelon stained mountains, and soft adobe structures of New Mexico served as the backdrop for her most loved childhood memories and sustained her with their primitive raw beauty and subtle haunting colors. She felt she belonged to this land and it to her.

“My rock story begins with simple cardboard shoeboxes. I collected specimens of pink quartz, chips of blue and green turquoise, ancient shell and fern fossils and big lovely sheets of mica (my favorite). I believed that my collection and my connection with rock were truly special. I still feel this way. Gratefully so.”

Kai graduated with honors three times and has a Master’s in Education, two BA’s, and a true love of literature, poetry and foreign languages. She taught at both the graduate and elementary levels. Her travels have taken her to Europe, South America, Mexico, Guatemala, Canada and China.

“I love the journeying, exploration and the relinquishing into trust that comes with the adventure of travel.”

Kai met Bruce Eckhardt, a talented lapidary, who reintroduced her to the beauty of natural stones and encouraged her to explore her own creativity. She began her lapidary journey with a beginner’s mind and returned full circle to her passion for rocks.

Her goal is to bring forth the inherent beauty of each stone while maintaining its structural integrity. Kai cares about balance, color and clean design in her work and uses exclusively high-grade natural turquoise and gemstones.”

“My life, as well as my art, is an evolution of my soul. I trust that stone, in some form will always be a part of that evolutionary process. I am grateful for the desert and mountain beauty that continues to inspire me, to my journey, just as it is, to my teachers and to my hallmark KAIZEN, which means ‘on going progress involving everyone’.”

Kai Gallagher's work may be seen at Sorrel Sky Gallery, 870 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. 970-247-3555.

   by Carol McDermott

Life is movement for kinetic expressionist Mark Mace, whose interests are as varied as any Renaissance man's. He skates, skis, runs, reads, climbs, hikes, bikes, and dances, in addition to expressing himself through visual art.

Mark is self-taught, beginning with watercolors in 1991, and moving to oil in 1997. "Doing art is an activity which produces an artifact. Dynamic self-expression asks that we be willing to abandon a degree of control and predictability, in order to better understand the dynamic of creativity within relationships, among the principles of art. Life asks that we do our own work."

His patrons often ask how long it takes to do a piece. They are obsessed with skills. Mark paints by principle, not subject. "The painting has more soul. I try not to be subject-dominant, but rather to exhibit artful behavior."

Why does the world need art?

“Because in the milieu of our life, we can’t see context. In art we see the dynamics, the relationships, we ride with it. Our influence increases.”

With his adventure in oil painting, Mark found his skills greatly diminished in this slippery medium, and his artistic possibilities vastly expanded.

His most successful pieces are “a dance of life across the canvas from inside out, as well as outside in. His energy and humor are apparent in any form: portrait, landscape, still life, or abstract,” according to his biographer.

Mark’s work is available at the San Juan Gallery, 725 Main Street, Ouray, Colo.  Open May - October.

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Linda Nadel
Imagine That!
  
by Kathryn Retzler

She’s a truly happy person.  We’re talking the real deal here, where there is happiness in every brushstroke and it shows on every painting she does.   “Every time I pick up a paintbrush, it’s pure joy!” Linda says. “When people look at my artwork, they see ‘Happy!’ and that makes them happy too.” I’m an every day persons’ artist, people relate to my subjects and it makes them feel good.”

To learn more about Linda and to view some of her work or register for a class or workshop, please visit her at indanadel.com

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Barbara Torke
Out of the (art) Closet

I feel no stork, but some alien spacecraft, dropped me, an infant clutching a box of crayons, onto my mother’s gurney that Sunday in 1939. The nurses rushed to the golf course and drug Doc Woodward from his game, and there I was—pink and flushed from my space flight. My mother cried. I cried (my musical debut). My father cried (he wanted a boy.) My grandmother cried, “See? I told you that woman wouldn’t have pretty babies.” The doctor cried. He almost had a birdie.
 

I consider my birth my first attempt at creating art. Not only drama, but music, and I must have drawn all over the hospital walls.
 
My second artistic attempt was at two, when, like Marcel Duchamp I leaned over the everyday commode (brand new I might add…and in the house), and created a sculpture of baby blankets and diapers, then added the flusher music. Claes Oldenburg must have gotten his sandwich ideas from me. At five, I became a muralist. It was the beginning of a long career of painting on walls. I understand how Michelangelo’s mom must have felt. The kitchen wall was green, so it was highly susceptible to the fields of Indian camps, teepees, horses, travois, children and families that raced around the wall. It took tears and muscle before I learned the skill of the Bab-O stroke.
 
My entire childhood consisted of farm animals, horses especially, and, of course, the belief that all walls should be decorated. Being on a farm, I had models—and walls. I drew flying horses, horses on roller skates, horses in cars and trains. At school I drew horses on all my papers. Mrs. Mayer thought she had me fooled and let me draw with colored chalk on the blackboard. I cried when she erased it for math. I went back to drawing in the books, on my spelling papers, and in between addition problems. I quit when my sixth grade teacher gave me an F because I’d messed up my spelling paper. I didn’t cry, but I got even. I didn’t give up drawing.
 
Weldon Valley High School had no art program. Like Van Gogh and Monet I wandered in the fields and painted what I saw. I had been painting with oils since my fourth grade Christmas of fourth grade when I received my first oil painting set, a wooden box. I still have it. My champion in high school was Frosty (Coach Foster). He had suffered shell shock in the war and had art therapy. Frost’s trauma qualified him to teach me art. I painted. He snuck out and continued his liquid recovery program. There were twelve of us in the graduating class. I did murals for dances and proms, and I illustrated the yearbook. Small schools are pretty adaptive for my kind.
 
I graduated form Colorado State College in Greeley, now UNC, with a degree in art and education. Four years of luxuriating in academia was a delight. I felt like Paul Gauguin, and like him I was in a foreign county. I often wondered where my mother-ship was.
 
Motherhood, yes. Mother-ship, no. After college, I taught school. We had four kids. Picasso always wanted to paint like a child. I painted a child. That is, they had alizarin crimson diapers, viridian streaks in their hair, and a little yellow ochre on their coveralls. We all painted on the walls.
 
My master’s degree was at the encouragement of my husband. They were asking for continuing education in California. One of my assignments was to make marionettes. One marionette took sixty hours, and was one of eight projects. I was in heaven. All four kids were chewing on the wooden arms and legs. Meals are not an issue when an etching plate is due.
 
Teaching for thirty years, all levels, all subjects—including art, made for an odd painting schedule. I did a wonderful woodland scene, with deer, on the stairway landing of our townhouse. I traded a mural on a shed for a couch. I went to Lodo on Sunday morning, and tripping over drunks, painted murals in a warehouse for an interior design and resin casting business. The owner was the best critic I ever met. He taught me a lot about composition, design, and message. Doug was my own Da Vinci. I was learning from the master. I painted abstracts, filled sketchbooks, and of course had my kids up to their elbows in crafts all the time. At times, we needed to wash the glue off the macaroni so we’d have something to eat, but we did okay.
 
I didn’t retire from teaching: I took a career realignment. That is to say, they bought me out for a computer program. Yes, I felt guilty. But then, I needed to paint. I wanted to paint. I had done my art on walls, and sketchbooks, and shirt-fronts. I’d sold a few, done some commissions, and some commercial art. I’d taught junior college, recreation, and gym. It was time for me to come out of the closet. Yes, I had become a closet painter.
 
My friend, Cheryl, had left Denver, moved to Minnesota, then Montrose, and then settled in Ouray. I had spent some time in New Mexico and had dreams of being Georgia O’Keefe. I should have known I wasn’t married to a photographer. I stayed in Ouray, painted in New Mexico, and house hunted. Not to say I didn’t paint. Every breathing moment I was at my art—even if not behind the brush. I wouldn’t recommend sketching on the interstate, but hey.
 
Eventually, I bought a house in Delta. I figured it was a hub. I painted with friends in Grand Junction. I had the Grand Mesa, Escalante Canyon, Dallas Divide, the monument, the Uncompahgre Plateau, and a mess of rivers and creeks spread out before me like a colorful palette. And clouds. How I love this sky. Taking my Rodeo, my dog, and my paints, I drove all over the area around my hub.
 
In Cedaredge, I found the Apple Shed, and Main Street Gallery. I had heard the art community was in Cedaredge, and on the Scenic Byway, here it was. Connie Williams hired me to work in the gallery. I was immersed in art. My association with all the other artists was as an inspiration and led to the forming of a co-operative group, Cedars Edge Gallery. The evolution of the gallery was a natural, healthy product of all our energies. Artists want to do art; they don’t want to sell other people’s art, especially. To me, it became an art work in itself. Connie was a trainer extraordinaire. We hung shows, and I learned another level of art.…still full of walls.
 
Caole Lowry of Planet Earth provided more walls. I did a retrospective show there in 2001. What a trip down Memory Lane. I have a lot of art. I dread what my heirs have to deal with, but it’s been fun. With the help of Dale Roble, and great students, Cedars Edge Gallery and the classes I teach are another canvas, another wall.
 
I still miss Taos and New Mexico dirt.
 
I also love words. Mr. Akins, my seventh grade teacher, wisely saw my potential (we won’t say for what). He bribed the students with Snickers and Big Hunk bars to write stories. Page after page kept me happy, and quiet. I thought I liked Snickers at the time. Now I know writing made recess come more quickly.
 
Writing was a catharsis for many years. Stories let me make new worlds. Now poems intersperse my work. The sketches, stories, songs, music, drawings, paintings, and any art I make, take me back to my mother-ship.…wherever it is parked. I’ll never stop emerging from that darkness, waving my box of crayons, and searching for walls.

Barbara's work may be seen in Cedaredge, Colo. at Cedars Edge Gallery,   and The Appleshed.  She also shows at various galleries in Western Colorado and New Mexico. For more about Barbara, or to register for one of her classes or workshops, please visit her at Cedars Edge Gallery.com

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by Leanne Goebel

“I’m pedantic and insufferable. Ask anyone,” Rory Wagner says of himself.

There is no need to ask. The precision is evident. Thousands of tiny dots of paint are applied to the canvas with a double aught brush to create the fabric pattern in the scarf worn by the woman in “Charlemagne’s Baubles of Deceit.” The beadwork on the dress circa 1860-1870 worn by the Sioux woman in “Strength of a Woman” is historically accurate. One can’t help but marvel at the assiduity of his work.

Well-researched details about the artifacts used, the tribe represented, concepts, or other informative tidbits are written by Rory on the back of his canvases like a secret message to help decode the enigma. In “Strength of a Woman” the enigma is in the background. The eyes of writer Honoré de Balzac from a sculpture by the Auguste Rodin fill the canvas. Balzac appears to be crying tears of blood.

These enigmatic details are not the only things about Rory’s canvases that nearly defy description. There is depth in the skin tone of Rory’s often historic, frequently mythological subjects. They look not painted but rubbed, layer upon layer. This self-taught technique has been called revolutionary and innovative, but don’t suggest such haughty words to Rory.

“The painting process I use may be unique. I have never actually known any ‘academic’ methods. Call it lazy, arrogant, or just plain stupid. I paint exactly like I draw...even using an eraser. Innovative? No. Desperate? Yes. I think...” he says.

Rory was chosen as the 2006 recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. According to Governor Bill Richardson, the prestigious tribute is awarded to artists who exemplify the energy and creativity of New Mexico, a state that ranks second behind New York in art sales.

Sorrel Sky Gallery in Durango, Colorado has represented Rory Wagner for five years and his work attracts a wide audience of collectors and art aficionados. He was given a private showing there last Sepember. It was his last.
Wagner says. “I grow more reclusive by the day. My studio has become my world.”

Wagner's art is currently on exhibit at Sorrel Sky Gallery, 870 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. 970-247-3555.
www.sorrelsky.com

Even as a youngster folks knew Connie was around. She was always outside, always around the people and the animals at her dad’s sale barn in Montrose, always drawing –in the dirt, on boards and rocks. Maybe that’s where it started. As she scuffled around in her little red cowboy boots she learned to see the world in a different light. She learned how to read people, and how to interpret what she saw. Her mom, Audrey Nicks, shrugs, “She just kinda raised herself.” Perhaps she is recalling the one-booted little girl pushing her doll buggy around the sale yards, naked as a jay-bird except for one red cowboy boot, the left one that she couldn’t get off.
 
As a teenager Connie was a barrel racer and rodeo queen. She gazes away, “I don’t remember ever asking if I could do a rodeo. I just got things ready, and told them I needed someone to drive me.” She loved calf roping. “That was the most fun.” She traveled state-wide being a participant, contestant, and winner.
 
As a college student she studied art and business in Gunnison. Connie won multiple awards for her innovative watercolor work, and exhibited in juried shows nation wide. Her art was and is visible throughout the country. In the community she hung paintings in Main Street Gallery, Cedaredge. Then she started her own gallery in the Apple Shed. As the Apple Shed complex developed Connie won awards from her alma mater, Western State College.
 
The Apple Shed was an inspiration only Connie could see. Her husband Dan, a third generation orchard grower in Cedaredge, supported her ‘whim’, and she bought the old ruin of a shed on Grand Mesa Drive before it was to be torn down. “I couldn’t see all that history being bull-dozed,” she says. Anyone who doubts Connie’s ability to revive and forecast, has but to look at old photos of the shed, and the renovated ‘Shed’ of today. It still sits over the spring that cooled the fruit in the twenties through the fifties. Ghosts of peach fuzz and laughing youths and suntanned neighbors who worked their summers at the sorting sheds still linger in the basement.
 
Daphna Russell’s studio, as well as other local artists and businesses, were located in the shed the first few years. Cedars Edge Gallery started at the Apple Shed as well as Apple Tree Hollow. It still evolves, still shows the wood and apple scents and textures of its history.
 
As is true of Connie’s gift the Apple Shed grows. Still packed with art, fruit, kitchenware, furniture, and a fine deli, there is a building full of interior decorating ideas and items to support those ideas. Paintings to fit the taste and themes of homes everywhere wait on the walls, from Ron Hoeksema, the Musser Brothers, to Pat Stetler, to Connie Williams herself. Yes, she has prints of her work—even she can’t keep up with the fresh artwork that is desired. An occasional consignment works. She keeps a studio and when possible, there she is.
 
But Connie doesn’t stop there. Being a workaholic of standing, she and Dan have created the Garden Center in Delta. Besides pleasant walks in the maze of plants and trees and garden settings, the Sunflower Bistro is a pleasant place to sip a cool drink and enjoy Lisa Carr’s amazing meals. Of course there is more art, and furniture. They took a little cottage, again in a questionable state of habitation, and transformed it into a wholesale and retail garden spot—with all the accoutrements.  Connie is the first to admit she likes glitz and glitter. Dazzling, whatever happens.
 
Connie prepares places to lift the spirits of everyone who visits. She earned Outstanding Business woman award in 1996 from her alma mater, Western state College, as well as Outstanding All-Around Alumni 1997, and a final award for one of Outstanding long term alumni. Even so it isn’t the glory. As is true of all success stories, it doesn’t start with so large a goal. Connie has supported the arts in Delta County (and the state of Colorado—especially the western slope) her entire career. The fact that she donates the Apple Shed space for art shows for the regional high schools, Delta Fine Arts (which she helped create), and the elementary school show, exhibits her dedication. Apples, Aspen and Art was begun to support Applefest, and was a highlight for years when harvest time came.
 
This year a women’s show showcased paintings, sculpture, fibers, and an assortment of fantastic art from outstanding women artists of the western slope. Now she is sponsoring and supporting more advertisement and endorsement of the western slope and four corners area with the concept of an art collector’s guide. “Many great artists live on the western slope and show in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Phoenix. We need to have people see their art, buy their art, and come to Colorado to do it,” she says.
 
If anyone can make it happen, Connie Williams will. With the help of a good supporting cast she works her artistic magic on the canvas of Colorado. Health problems don’t slow her down, they just redirect her. Her medium is her gallery and her ideas turn into reality. Each time she changes direction, the momentum of her art causes new surprises to appear.