Fine jewelry, photography and paintings in acrylics, watercolors and other styles were on display on East Second Avenue Saturday for the first day of the 30th annual Durango Autumn Arts Festival.
According to the Durango Arts Center, which puts on the Durango Autumn Arts Festival, an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 people visit the festival every year.
Hundreds perused and examined the art on display and for sale at nearly 80 artist booths, as live rhythmic Nigerian drums sounded in the background over one block of East Second Avenue and live radio played across another.
Wendy Wilkerson, who lives near Pecos, New Mexico, about 25 miles from Santa Fe, said she’s attended the Durango Autumn Arts Festival for many years and she’s “very glad to come back” this year – and so are her fans.
“This is a very good show,” she said. “ … My work seems to be well received. I actually have people who have bought more than one piece, which, to me, is thrilling because I get to go home with you. I’m in your dining room, I get to eat with you. I'm in the kitchen. It's very interesting that they would purchase multiple times through multiple years.”
Wilkerson’s booth featured gouache watercolors on rice paper, a tricky medium to work with. She said the gouache has a clay base, and the rice paper she works on is as thin as tissue paper.
“Being watercolor, if I get it too wet, it dissolves. If I get it too dry, it tears,” she said. “So I’ve learned to work a happy medium.”
When she is watercoloring, she starts painting on the back of the rice paper. The colors are visible through the thin fibers of the paper. Then she’ll flip the paper around to apply the main features of the piece in watercolor paints. Painting on both sides of the paper gives an illusion of depth that is hard to attain in more traditional mediums, she said.
Her works on display included a diptych showing the sun and moon cycle, with a moon partially eclipsed by a sun and flowering tree branches in the left painting, and the rest of the sun and the tree the branches stem from in the right painting. A smaller piece of work features a raven standing in a field before another sun and moon cycle.
“There's a lot of symbolism in the paintings, for instance, the sun and moon that represent the cycles of life and how things are coming,” she said.
She said the line work in the diptych is done in copper and silver, and as light shifts, it highlights the images featured. The point isn’t to make the images more definitive, but to demonstrate the interconnectedness and interrelationships of the featured images, she said.
In an artist statement describing the rice paper and gouache watercolors medium, Wilkerson said the dual-sided paint on rice paper “gives weight and strength to it, as what we have brought into our lives has strengthened who we are.”
“The use of gouache, a heavily pigmented watercolor, is also a carefully chosen medium,” she said. “The opaque nature of gouache, no matter how much it is diluted, does not thin nor weaken in intensity. And so is life.”
Wilkerson represented Cicuye Studios on Saturday.
“(Cicuye is) the name of the ancient peoples of the area where I live. There’s actually a historical site there that's over 12,000 years old. So, yeah, it's a nice, established neighborhood,” she said.
Denver painter Joe McManis was featuring various scenic acrylic paints. He said he uses those in combination with a palette knife to create the textures his works feature. Taking inspiration from American abstract expressionists such as Andy Warhol and Hans Hoffman, his works feature different colored squares, breaking the paintings into varying blocks of colors.
He said his goal with the featured work was to contemporize the abstract expressionist style. But like his paintings, and how they’ve changed in style over time, he considers his life to be one long painting in progress.
“A lot of my work was instinctively documented; a feeling or something that I had and made a painting out of it,” he said.
He said his life and his paintings are like two parallel roads leading to the same place.
This year’s Durango Autumn Arts Festival brought McManis back to Durango for the first time in “quite a while.” Just like his life and his work, he said a lot has changed.
“I used to be a professional musician in the band that I was in,” he said. “We would come and play, and that bar doesn't even exist anymore. There was a bar here where we would come and play all the time.”
Despite his long hiatus, he said he’s glad to be back in Durango. The city has a “cool vibe,” even if he hardly recognizes anything.
McManis has always been artistically talented. He was a professional musician, and then for years a graphic designer. He now paints full-time, creating about 20 pieces a year. He said if someone wants to make a living out of their art just like he does, they have to commit to the role of an artist.
“You have to do what you like, even if you get frustrated,” he said.
He also said that if no one is buying the work, just keep at it. One must experiment and try different things, and one will eventually find a style he or she likes and others like to keep exploring that, he said.
Durango woman and freelance photographer Shanda Akin is no stranger to Durango or adventure. She graduated from Durango High School in 1991 and served 25 years in the United States Air Force.
She’s practiced photography all over the world, but decided to take on photography full-time upon returning to Durango. Her first project resulted in 94 photos of Durango and the surrounding area, immortalized in a book called “The Beauty of Durango.”
On display at her booth Saturday were stunning photos of the San Juan National Forest, Cascade Falls and Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad locomotives.
“My approach is more of a natural photographer, trying to catch the details (of) the grand landscapes, but keep it in a way that people can actually drive and see and recognize and connect with (the locations),” she said.
She’s fond of long exposure photography, as evident in her photograph of Cascade Creek in the dead of winter called “Ice Foundry.”
“I call it ‘Ice Foundry’ because it’s like a chimney,” she said.
The photograph depicts a frozen waterfall with ice cold water flowing underneath it. Center frame, the ice gives way, creating a void in the shape of a chimney as she described.
When it comes to photo composition, contrasting colors, shapes and lines guide a viewer’s eyes over the piece.
In one photograph showing a bridge across a snowy Animas River, she pointed out how stones in the bottom center of the piece lead into the middle center, meeting the bridge.
The bridge’s horizontal lines fill out the piece, contrasting with the vertical lines of the stones.
“I just loved growing up hear in Durango … We used to take drives all over the place and up the passages. My mom and dad would take us picnicking. … I just love the outdoors,” she said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
A previous version of this story misspelled artist Joe McManis’s name.
