Helios Art House Comes to Longmont (Boulder Weekly 4/3/2024)

Helios Public Art House Breathes New Life Into Longmont
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly 4/3/2024

Jamée Lucas Loeffler might not look like your typical artist, sculptor or gallery owner, but he’s actually all three. The burly and bearded 51-year-old definitely looks the part of his other life, though.

“I build,” says the New Jersey native who has lived in Colorado most of his life. “If you want me to come out and dig a foundation and build you a house, I could do it from the ground up. Whatever you want. I’m a builder, but I was a mason first.”

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Painting From Life (Boulder Lifestyle 6/1/2022)

Painting From Life
Remington Robinson Finds His Niche
by Adam Perry for Boulder Lifestyle 6/1/2022

Boulder painter Remington Robinson, a Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design graduate, has lived here for almost 20 years, but our stunning setting still inspires him regularly.

“The rock formations and the mountains are always fun to paint, either up close or from far away,” he says. “When you have atmosphere involved—if there is weather—that’s always fun to do paintings of. Maybe some days there is snow or rain, or light shining through the atmosphere. Something about the mountains is always fun to paint, but then there’s all the different subject matter within town that has nothing to do with the mountains.”

Read the rest at Boulder Lifestyle’s website here.

INTERVIEW: Marisa Aragón Ware (Boulder Weekly 12/16/2021)

Boulder’s Marisa Aragón Ware didn’t know what to expect when she was chosen as a contestant on the Discovery Channel’s Meet Your Makers earlier this year after the show found her work on Instagram. A unique and brilliant artist who delves into numerous mediums from extraordinarily intricate paper sculpture to commercial illustration, concert posters and even children’s books, Ware was initially told she didn’t even make the cut to fly to Los Angeles and compete.

“The producer of the show emailed me, and they wanted me to apply,” she explained recently during a conversation in her basement studio in South Boulder. “The application process was intense. I applied and they told me I didn’t get selected.”

“A week or two later, they contacted me and said, ‘Actually, we want you to be on the show.’ There was only a week before I had to fly out. We had to fly out, quarantine for a couple days, and there was one day of filming interviews and then the day of the competition. They picked us up from the hotel at 6:30 in the morning and we didn’t get dropped off until 9:30 that night. It was the longest, most stressful day. The whole competition was in one day.”

READ THE REST AT BOULDERWEEKLY.COM HERE

Remington Robinson: Inspired by Everything From Meditation to Mint Tins (Westword 10/27/21)

INTERVIEW: Remington Robinson
by Adam Perry for Westword 10/27/2021

Painter Remington Robinson has an unlikely inspiration in Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier, the Swiss author and photographer who claims to have had repeated contact with extraterrestrials. About fifteen years ago, Robinson discovered Meier while surfing YouTube; he eventually traveled to a tiny town in Switzerland to visit with the one-armed UFO scholar. Today, Robinson’s painting of Meier hangs prominently in his Boulder studio.

“I think that the movement he’s created with his literature very well could be the most important event that has happened in history,” Robinson says, “but 99.99 percent of people don’t know about it. He says that the meaning of life is to evolve our consciousness and to expand in all areas of knowledge and wisdom and also just be more peaceful, loving. He says there are human beings throughout the universe and that applies to all of them, and I just liked that.”

READ THE REST AT WESTWORD.COM HERE

Francesca Woodman MCA Exhibit (Westword 7/8/2019)

photo courtesy George Lange

MCA Poised to Present Francesca Woodman’s First Colorado Exhibit  
by Adam Perry for Westword 7/8/2019

Legendary photographer Francesca Woodman, who was born in 1958, spent most of her childhood in Colorado, where she graduated from Boulder High School and was raised by parents who were successful, devoted and, some might say, obsessive artists.

Her father, George, was a Harvard and University of New Mexico graduate who taught at the University of Colorado for five decades. “The idea that art expresses your self…was really distant for us,” George Woodman says in the 2010 documentary The Woodmans. “When we look at someone else’s work, we don’t [ask], ‘What does this tell us about that person?’ We’re talking about ‘What does this work of art say?’ Forget the artist.”

READ THE REST AT Westword.com HERE

Hello, Bali! Naropa Student Collaborates with Balinese Artists On Book

Hello, Bali!
Naropa student collaborates with young Balinese artists on book
By Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly, 3/10/2011

Flying to Bali this past September for a semester of for-credit study abroad, 24-year-old Naropa University student Jacqueline Tardie had no idea what to expect. A senior with dual majors in art and religion, Tardie didn’t know the Bahasa Indonesia language or what she’d be working on for her final required independent-study project. She also didn’t know the bathroom situation would be so different from what she’s used to in America.

“I had never thought, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be doing squat toilets’ and ‘Oh, you’re gonna be showering with a trough of water and a bucket for four months,’” Tardie says. “That was the biggest shock. It was extremely challenging. But it’s a very forgiving culture.”

After two months in Bali, Tardie heard about the Seniwati Gallery — a school and gallery for female artists ages 6 to 16 — and almost immediately knew she’d found her project.

“I looked back at my journal from the first week I was there and realized I had written about working with kids and books and art,” she says. “I didn’t really think about it that much, and then it happened. I heard about this gallery in Ubud and I went and met the women who worked there. They held these art classes for young girls, and I was like, ‘This is perfect. I want to work here.’” Fluent in Bahasa Indonesia by the end of her stay in Bali, Tardie decided to make a beautiful full-color 30-page collection of art and stories — called Seniwati Sanggar Muda, all the work of the young women at the Seniwati Gallery — and sell it to make money to help the school keep going. She was able to raise enough money to have the book printed, and all of the proceeds are going back to the school. Book sales will help at least 300 girls afford to study at the Seniwati Gallery.

Tardie printed 1,000 copies of the book (buy the book at jackandbali.wordpress.com or by contacting Tardie at jacquelinelate@gmail.com) and brought 400 copies back to Boulder. The young artists’ vibrant works in oil pastel and colored pencil depict wildly vivid mountains, flowers, gods and goddesses, birds and smiling children. The accompanying stories and descriptions, written by the girls and translated by Tardie, melt the heart and — like the book’s wonderful paintings and drawings — make one marvel at the talent of these Balinese artists.

Surprisingly, it cost Tardie about the same amount of money to spend an inspiring semester in Bali as it would’ve for her to remain at Naropa, the school from which she’ll be graduating in May. And the natural juxtaposition of art and spirituality in Balinese culture was a perfect fit for her interests.

“It was my intent to study art and religion,” Tardie says, “but when I asked these girls to draw something I wanted it to be a free expression of what was important to them, for them to tell their story as artists and young women in Bali. I just wanted it to come out, and in that you have explanations of religious ceremonies.

“I think that art is often expressed on such a deep subconscious level, and religious or spiritual experiences happen on that same level.”

The head of the household where Tardie was staying in Bali — Ibu Surini, a woman in her early 60s — was killed in a motorbike accident near the end of Tardie’s semester abroad, and the funeral turned out to be one of the most moving events the student-artist has experienced.

“We brought her ashes to the sea, and it was the most beautiful thing to be there,” she says. “The ocean has always been a very cleansing place for me, and thinking of how beautiful it was for her to be returned to the ocean is so powerful. Also, experiencing death there is so incredibly different. There’s room for mourning, but it’s such a beautiful thing. It’s not scary. It’s really wonderful to be returned to that cycle of life. That was the most amazing thing — I was happy for her. I loved her and I was sad she wasn’t here anymore, but there was no fear because I knew she was well. There was a sadness, for sure, but she’s not gone.”

In the past 70 years, Bali has struggled to free itself from Dutch and Japanese rule, not to mention the “puppet master” president Suharto, but with creative institutions such as the Seniwati Gallery — and the help of passionate outsiders such as Tardie — the “Glorious Bali Island” of almost 4 million people is now revealing its singular beauty to the world.

As 12-year-old Ni Putu Atik Purdhana writes in Senawati Sanggar Muda, “The Balinese are proud to see their own culture become famous. I am also proud.”

For more information and to buy Seniwati Sanggar Muda, contact Jacqueline Tardie at jacquelinelate @gmail.com or visit jackandbali.wordpress.com