Home

• Email
• Post a comment
• Print
• 

Photo Gallery

Artists' Gallery of Steamboat July show

For its July show, Artists' Gallery of Steamboat features oil paintings by Adam Zabel, Orotone photographic prints by Barbara Sanders and pastels by RC Dieckhoff.

Steamboat Springs — Adam Zabel knows landscapes.

When he sits down to paint scenes of the Yampa Valley, the Routt County native doesn't need to snap a photo or even step out of his door. He just needs to think about the details of the scenery and get those down on canvas as accurately as possible.

"I would say I'm more of a realist and an impressionist. I see more detail when I'm doing something," Zabel said. The artist's detail-heavy images of landscapes and wildlife have been on display at the Artists' Gallery of Steamboat since he joined the cooperative in January and will be featured at the gallery in July.

"Songs of Summer," which also features prints by Barbara Sanders and pastels by R.C. Dieckhoff, opens with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Artists' Gallery and will be on display through the end of the month.

Zabel started his lifelong love of art as a child, going on trips along the Mississippi River with his grandfather, toting pencils and paints to make his own renditions of what he saw. He won his first art competition during his 4 1/2 years in the military. Moving back home, he stepped away from the three-dimensional art that characterizes much of the crafty side of the Zabel family to make realistic, two-dimensional depictions.

"This is where all of my natural ability lies, is with art and design," Zabel said.

Dieckhoff uses nature as a basis for the dozen pastels he has in "Songs of Summer." "RARE: Imperiled Plants of Colorado," an exhibit of botanical illustrations on display through the end of summer at Steamboat Art Museum, inspired Dieckhoff to adopt wildflowers and other plants as his subjects, he said.

The pastels focus "on the bulbs themselves rather than the whole plant," giving gallery visitors what Dieckhoff calls "the bee's-eye view." Dieckhoff's rolling landscapes sit in the background of each work and represent where each plant naturally would be found.

Printmaker Sanders tackled the multi-step photographic process known as Orotone for a collection of 15 images featured in "Songs of Summer."

The Orotone technique is a chemical process that follows several steps to turn a photograph into a negative image crafted on a gold background. The technique at Sanders' hands results in images of the Yampa Valley and Hawaiian wildflowers set chromatically gold-backed paper.