Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/513510
Completed this spring, Christopher Martin's mammoth 96-inch by 96-inch Amina features acrylic paint on sanded acrylic plexiglass, a combination of media that gives it its glossy finish. COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER MARTIN Many artists come to rely on the ebb and flow of their own careers to further fuel their creativity and expression. For these Roaring Fork Valley artists, such regrowth has come from three disparate sources: for one, a career retrospective, for another, a residency abroad; for the last, plain boredom! GILDED IN BETWEEN: CHRISTOPHER MARTIN Reverse-glass paintings work from the foreground to the background, so that the last strokes of acrylic paint, on the panes of glass farthest from the viewer, have the smallest visible effect. It's a technique that's garnered Christopher Martin exhibitions all over the country, including in Dallas, where he began his painting in the mid-'90s. (He was born and raised in Florida.) Now, Martin, 46, is spending more and more time in Aspen, calling it home and setting up shop: In 2010, he opened his namesake gal- lery on Cooper Avenue. Simultaneously looking backward and forward is nothing new for Martin. Much of his work modernizes Renaissance techniques for glass adornment and gilding, called verre églomisé, to create his abstract, contemporary paintings. Any one of his pieces can contain up to 30 individually painted or gilded panes of glass. These images are layered atop one another, capturing depth and complexity—it's as important, and as natural, to unpeel these layers, seeing again what they contained. In that same spirit, he's recently released a retrospective book called Twenty Years, which examines the scope of his entire career. Book signing and "Twenty Years Retrospective" opening July 23; "Canvas Anew" and "A Focused Retrospective" opening August 6. Christopher Martin Gallery, 525 E. Cooper Ave., 970-925-7649; christopherhmartin.com EXPLORE THE ARTISTIC BOUNTY OF ASPEN'S SURROUNDS. Aspen may get a lot of the local arts attention, but many institutions all over the valley are making ripples in their own right. During the summer, Anderson Ranch Arts Center's (5263 Owl Creek Road, Snowmass, 970-923-3181; anderson ranch.org) serene four and a half acres in Snowmass Village have increasingly become a magnet for blockbuster artists during the summer thanks in part to new Executive Director Nancy Wilhelms—take recent National Artist Award recipient Frank Stella. In 1970, the American painter and printmaker became the youngest artist in history to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has since gone on to exhibit worldwide and receive prestigious recognitions, among them the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, in 2010. This fall, Stella's work will inaugurate the new downtown location of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and then travel, in 2016, to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Amid all this, Stella has made being celebrated at Anderson Ranch's July 16 gala a priority, alongside the other honorees, Jennifer and David Stockman, who will be recognized for their arts patronage. All three will appear as part of Anderson Ranch's Featured Artists & Conversations series on July 15 and July 16. The summer series, which is free to the public, also includes McArthur Binion, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Lizzie Fitch, Trevor Paglen, Arlene Shechet, Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Ryan Trecartin, as well as collector Dennis Scholl; curators Dr. Jeffrey Grove and Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum; and Walter Isaacson, presi- dent and CEO of the Aspen Institute. Midvalley, the Wyly Art Center's (99 Midland Ave., Basalt, 970-927-4123; wylyarts.org) burgeoning calendar has created its own buzz. More than two dozen artists rotate through Wyly's two gallery spaces in Basalt—the CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE 122 ASPENPEAK-MAGAZINE.COM THREE ROARING FORK VALLEY ARTISTS TAKE DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT LEAPS OF ARTISTIC FAITH.