exhibit description
This exhibit features the work of local artists who find inspiration in the transformation of our landscape at springtime.
Fort Collins muralists—Chelsea Ermer, Diane Findley, Joe Motive, Shawna Turner, Kristen Vohs (shown above, left to right)—painted murals on 5-by-8-foot canvases inside the gallery to create their expressions of spring for the exhibit. Visitors can now enjoy the completed murals.
A selection of artworks by members of Plein Air Artists of Colorado will be featured in the lobby gallery. En plein air is the French expression for “in the open air.” Plein air painters leave their studios behind and experience painting and drawing in the landscape. This desire to be in nature creates the ideal opportunity to capture the unique characteristics of the season.
Artists
Chelsea Elmer
Chelsea Ermer is an artist, illustrator and teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado. Her murals can be found on several transformer cabinets and Pianos About Town pianos throughout town. She is particularly interested in creating art about flowers and nature, fantasy, and mythology.
Diane Findley
A 1976 graduate of Colorado State University, Diane Findley is a long-standing presence in the Fort Collins art community. A prolific potter and painter, she maintains Findley Pottery & Fine Art in Fort Collins. Diane takes great pride in currently serving as president of Trimble Court Artisans cooperative, which she has been a member for more than 45 years. It is the oldest retail arts and crafts cooperative in the United States.
Joe Motive
Joe Motive is a self-taught artist from Santa Cruz, California. He specializes in traditional, digital, and virtual reality art. Joe enjoys painting on a multitude of surfaces and sizes. Joe’s style varies but is usually very colorful and vibrant. Most of his work is originally inspired from the surf and skate culture of Santa Cruz.
Shawna Turner
Shawna Turner is a multi-passionate fine artist, photographer, and graphic designer residing in Fort Collins. Her favorite subjects to paint are nature and animals, as well as intuitive abstracts. She’s forever a painter though her most recent showing of work includes assemblages with found objects, such as rusty metal, rocks, shells, or bones. She feels her soul was made to create and it’s in creating that she thrives.
Kristen Vohs
Painting has been Kristen Vohs’ passion for the last 20 years. She attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, before moving to Fort Collins in 2006 to continue her education at Colorado State University. She loves the process of making art and leans heavily on her intuition while painting. Kristen’s goal is to express an emotional meaning by using color and form, rather than to create a photorealistic depiction of the subject matter.
Plein Air Artists Colorado
Plein Air Artists Colorado (PAAC) was created for the love of plein air painting and to enjoy the camaraderie of painting outdoors. A founding principal is that PAAC creates opportunities for artists to paint outdoors together and that these paint outs be open to everyone of every level. The roots of PAAC go back many years (to the early 1990s) to the Art Students’ League of Denver when several landscape students started painting “En Plein Air” on a regular basis.