Pinedale is a Wyoming town working hard to infuse art into its veins; the movement is growing. A blooming flower, its seeds are sewn by local artists, Sue Sommers among them.
Her mural, seen here, is one of two completed in the past two years as part of Pinedale’s public art program. Sommers’ large-scale, whirling, arcing and bright painting, “Our Glittering World,” will remain at its current site for two years.
Pinedale’s public art initiative, IN|SITE EX|SITE, hosts an artists reception on Friday, February 8th, 6:30-8:30 pm at the Sublette County Library. Artists contributing work to Pinedale’s community, also to be honored, include Bronwyn Minton, JB Bond, Kirsten and Palmer Klarén, and Sommers.
I asked Sommers about the world she was considering as she created her mural.
“The mural’s theme was intended to complement the site on Pine Street,” says Sommers. I proposed autumn colors—colors we see in Pinedale’s surrounding mountains but that aren’t often found on our streets.”
(Aside: why is brown such a predominant color in our Western public art projects? We need vibrant art like Sommers’ to jump out, enliven us, tickle our senses! We must get past the brown-downtown mentality. End of aside.)
“So the theme was the play of light and color and air movement when you walk through a grove of aspen trees in the fall. This subject matter is an exhausted cliché in every medium except abstraction,” adds Sommers, “where you can’t represent anything literally, thank goodness!” Sommers’ process was spontaneous–she finds out “what the painting seems to want.” Her biggest adjustment was to scale up to painting a work 8 x 20′, taking three weeks of daily work to complete.
Nearly every day, Pine Street had a different painting to look at, until Sommers was finished. Local residents and visitors passed by, making the mural’s creation “as much a performance as a painting,” says the artist. For more information, contact Sommers at [email protected], or call 307-360-6205.
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Tayloe Piggott Gallery is unique in its practice of mailing out gorgeous cards announcing their next exhibit long before I receive their press releases. You should see the image on their latest communiqué; the gallery is bringing works by Wolf Kahn, February 8 – March 30, 2013. An opening reception takes place at the gallery Friday, February 8th, 5-8:00 pm.
The image on the card, “Picnic Spot in Yellowstone Park,” Oil on linen, was painted in 2010. Who among us, here at the foot of the Park that stunned the world, would not KILL to have this work, sight unseen?
The show, “Fields, Woods, Hills,” features 40 pastels and five oil paintings by the great landscape and color field painter. Kahn, in his 90’s, gets better with age. www.tayloepiggottgallery.com
Tammy Christel 
