Explore Steamboat Marketplace

Museum hosts inaugural plein air event with annual fundraiser

Friday, August 8, 2008

Photo by Matt Stensland. Enlarge photo.

Event organizers are (from right) Nancy Westphale, Shirley Stocks and Judith Harrington.

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly

By Margaret Hair (Contact)

On Monday morning, artists from across Colorado will show up at the Steamboat Art Museum, get as many canvasses as they want stamped with a museum logo, and head off into the wilderness — or along cleared trails — to paint.

At the end of the week, they’ll return to home base, wet canvasses in hand, and pick their three favorites to put up for exhibition and sale.

In its first year sponsoring such an event, museum representatives hope to reap a number of benefits, including: half of the money from each painting sold, attention from artists across the state to keep the contest growing in future years, and another monetary step toward official “museum” status.

“The plein air events are becoming kind of a thing in the art community,” said Shirley Stocks, who owns both locations of the Wild Horse Gallery and plans to participate in the paint-out, which encourages artists to work in mental snapshots as they create in open air.

“Almost all of the resort communities are doing a plein air event, so we thought we should do one, too. It just seems like it could be a big event for the museum,” Stocks said.

At the museum’s annual fundraiser on Aug. 16, some of the same artists will be asked to condense their week-long efforts into about two hours, painting one piece to go up for live auction.

“A lot of people have never seen someone paint something on location, within a time frame of like an hour-and-a-half,” said artist Richard Galusha, who has done similar events at Telluride and plans to join Stocks in representing Wild Horse Gallery at the Steamboat paint-out.

“It takes a lot of creativity … to create a piece that can stand on its own, but it’s a lot of fun,” Galusha said. A number of local artists have signed up for the event.

“We’ve had a great response. You know so many of the local artists, when you’re a painter and you live here, that’s what you want to go out and do — you want to go out in the wildflowers and paint,” Stocks said.

Since its fundraiser around this time last year, the Steamboat Art Museum has made progress on its proposal for a long-term lease; established itself as a nonprofit organization; hosted a $10.5 million art exhibit throughout the winter; slated another high-value experiment for this coming ski season; and upped its standards for security and control of temperature and humidity. All are steps to earning accreditation from the American Association of Museums.