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The mountains beckon

Diane West Gallery celebrates fourth anniversary

“Summer Meadow” is a small, square painting, but it has monumentality in its bones.

The oil-on-board landscape painting is by Denver artist Kelly Schurger. It’s one of 10 of her works now on display at the Diane West Jewelry & Art Gallery. Friday’s formal opening will mark West’s fourth anniversary of bringing contemporary, leading-edge art to our community.

Why a feeling of monumentality? The answer: simplicity, symmetry and the painter’s ability to express an intense response to nature in extremely reduced terms.

Schurger’s beautifully observed landscapes are not as abstract as most of the work West shows, but they could only have been painted by someone with a sophisticated understanding of a modernist point of view. Simple, often flat shapes, except for clouds, a limited palette, unusual compositional choices and a subtle sense of light add up to imaginatively composed, intensely silent landscapes.

Schurger has done what few conventional landscape painters do – contribute a new way of entering and interpreting the long, great tradition of Western landscape art.

The compositions are extremely reductive. In each of her paintings, Schurger focuses on a limited number of elements – part of a meadow, one or two banks of trees, a hovering cloud, fog or a mountain. Reducing every element to its essence, she often crops closely. Even a partial view can suggest a penetrating silence.

You won’t find any of the worn-out landscape conventions here – no corner tree, no mid-distance figures or rock outcropping, no river winding back to a mountain vista for a quick and easy, formulaic balance.

“The Light of Summer” is a large canvas with water meandering horizontally in the foreground. A yellow-green meadow rises to a high horizon and stops before a wall of flat gray mountains. A luminous sky hovers above.

With minimal means, smooth brushwork that tends to blend every area, Schurger glazes the scene with a magical light. Light quietly floods in from the left, silhouetting or shining on two separate groves of trees. All of these choices heighten a sense of the moment. The simplicity of the rendering underscores the silence.

In contrast, the most dramatic works on display are three large canvasses, two of impending storm or passing rain and one a spectacular view of high, snowy mountains.

“Down in the Valley” is the largest work in the show with a somewhat ironic title. The view is entirely of snowcapped peaks, mostly in shadow, with a faint pale yellow light that’s barely seen. The light announces emergent dawn and demonstrates again Schurger’s ability to capture a moment in what seems to be an eternal landscape.

Schurger is a young painter with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Tennessee Technological University and a master’s degree in arts technology from Illinois State University. Her artist statement indicates a youthful awareness of the landscape tradition she has so confidently entered.

This exhibit is a fine way to celebrate a gallery’s anniversary.

jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.

If you go

Paintings by Denver artist Kelly Schurger, to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Diane West Jewelry and Art Gallery, 934 Main Ave. Opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday. For information, call 385-4444 or visit www.dianewestart.com.



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