An exhibit featuring paintings by the late Four Corners painter Stanton Englehart will open Sunday at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores.
The artist’s daughter, Sharon Englehart of Mancos, will speak at the opening. Admission is free.
Englehart, who died in 2009, grew up about 10 miles from Dolores in Lewis.
He was best known for his huge, luminous landscapes with vivid colors that evoke the inner spirit of the Colorado Plateau.
The new exhibition, “Arches,” features 22 large oil paintings and 16 mixed-media works from the private collection of the Englehart Family Trust.
The show focuses on the recurring form of arches in Englehart’s work, and it is curated by Sharon Englehart, who has followed in her father’s artistic footsteps.
The paintings were painted in the 1980s and ’90s and reflect a deep appreciation for arches as an element in the landscape but also as “symbols of biology and its power over time through the evolutionary process,” in the written words of the artist.
“The title references a characteristic form in our local landscape, but also the internal feminine support that nourishes and supports us,” Sharon Englehart said.
The collection includes some paintings that are being shown to the public for the first time.
“In the paintings I selected, profound strength meets the delicate moment-to-moment reality of our existence,” Sharon Englehart said. “That encounter was interpreted in line and color by my father, a master painter, who spent a lifetime studying both.”
Stanton Englehart earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but returned to the Four Corners to live and paint.
He founded the art department at Fort Lewis College and retired in 1991 after 30 years on the faculty.
A short film featuring the artist and his work accompanies the exhibit.
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If you go
“Arches,” works by Stanton Englehart, will be on display at The BLM Anasazi Heritage Center through October. A free opening reception will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday. The center is three miles west of Dolores on Colorado Highway 184. The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information, call 882-5600 or visit www.co.blm.gov/ahc.
