Photos: C. Greg Gummersall, #6-C24-7, Acrylic/Collage on Canvas 6 x 5 ft. (Muse Gallery, Jackson, WY); #8-C25-15, Acrylic/Collage on Canvas 5 x 4 ft. (Gallery C, Hermosa Beach, CA);
Jenny Gummersall, photo from Egg Series.

Painter Greg Gummersall committed career suicide by moving to Bayfield. That’s what an Arizona museum curator told him. He’s proved her wrong, but it hasn’t been easy.

“It’s a trade off,” Gummersall said from his 80-acre ranch south of Bayfield. “But living here is a lifestyle choice.”

The lifestyle chosen by Gummersall and his wife Jenny, a photographer, is simple and placid, amid rolling hills with views of the San Juan Mountains, dogs, a cat and a cabin filled with art. Cell phone coverage is mostly nonexistent and high-speed Internet has not arrived.

The couple spends a significant amount of time on the road, meeting with gallery owners who sell their work.

“Ideally, I like to be home for two months painting and then gone for two weeks,” Greg said.
But he and Jenny do more than paint and photograph when they are home. Both contact galleries, send out packages and set up appointments for their next trip to Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico or California.

The system seems to work. Greg is represented by six galleries in Hermosa Beach, Calif., Jackson, Wyo., Denver, Telluride, Scottsdale, Ariz., Miami, Fla. and St. Petersburg, Russia. His paintings are in close to 40 corporate and personal collections. And he was featured in the October issue of Cowboys & Indians magazine.

But it isn’t enough. He’d like to have 10 galleries consistently selling his work.

Jenny is represented by Open Shutter Gallery in Durango. She’s also in Jackson, Wyo., Aspen, Denver and Telluride.

“Culturally, you have to get out and visit the art centers,” Greg said. “The cool thing about getting on the road is that we see the art and meet the artists. We get a feel for the galleries because the reality is, there are some people you do not want to do business with.”

The relationship between gallery and artist can be challenging. Galleries need a body of work, so the more galleries that represent the artist, the more work she or he must produce. Greg paints 100-150 pieces each year; many are 5 feet by 7 feet canvases layered with acrylic paint, photographs, paper, string and other material reconciling abstraction and realism.

Jenny photographs clouds, eggshells, children, palms and most recently a toy horse in natural settings. She uses natural light to create her imagery.

“The challenge to working with galleries is to provide everything they need to do their job, but not be overly involved,” Jenny said. “Working with a gallery is like a marriage.”

Greg constantly monitors the galleries and their sales volumes. If a gallery isn’t selling, he pulls out and finds another. He admits to quitting a gallery too soon because they had a slow year.

However, he has seen amateur artists hurt themselves by acting unprofessionally. At a recent show in Los Angeles, the gallery owner complained that inexperienced artists were handing out their business cards to patrons, which defies professional etiquette.

And Greg has dealt with unscrupulous gallery owners shortchanging him on commissions, saying a painting sold for $8,000 when it sold for $14,000.

“People often ask why we live here,” Jenny said. “And it’s important for me to live where my eye is not stopped by skyscraping walls.”

The Gummersalls understand that traveling is part of their life. But the couple also gives to the community, donating paintings and photographs to KSUT, the Durango Film Festival and Mercy Hospital fundraisers.

lgoebel@centurytel.net
Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs

L to R: Artwork by Adele Kurtz; Earth paintings by Maggie Remington; Adele Kurtz uses her shoe as a hammer to hang a new painting.

Resourceful local painter Adele Kurtz is coordinating a project with eight other area artists, all women, to help themselves by setting up a seasonal gallery in the Durango Mall. The name of the gallery is Art Touche; it’s across from Sears between Mrs. Fields and Pier One Imports.

I sat down with Kurtz in front of Mrs. Fields to discuss her venture. She told me that since hanging her art on the bare walls of the remodeled section of the Durango Mall, the response has been overwhelming.

“People walking by respond differently than jurors and curators at art shows and fairs and in galleries,” Kurtz said. “The art that the academics like is not the art that my mom or my brother or my sister buys. People turn their nose up when I tell them Iselling in the Durango Mall, but I think we have to get our of our ivory towers, come down from our studios in the mountains and get in touch with people.”

Several weeks ago, Kurtz contacted John Dickey at the Durango Mall and asked if they’d considered hanging art on the new walls near Linens ‘n Things and Pier 1 Imports. He said yes, but he didn’t know how to coordinate art exhibits. Kurtz offered to help.

She put out a call to local artists on the Durango artists Yahoo group Web site, but only one other artist, Maggie Remington, was willing to take the risk.

“Art Touche pays the insurance and utilities. This is basic liability insurance. It doesn’t cover theft or damage,” Kurtz wrote to the Yahoo group on November 4. “We were concerned about that initially, since we were in unprotected space, out in the open. But in five weeks we have not had a problem,” She added that she was worried the first weekend. She pictured originals being destroyed. But people are looking out for the art.

Kurtz said that the shoppers’ response has been enthusiastic. Her first sale was to a teenager who went to the ATM machine to buy a small piece for $35. Another group of teenagers offered to buy her a Slurpee after watching her paint.

“An older lady came up to me and said thank you for bringing such beauty into the world,” Kurtz said.

Now the artists are moving to a 1,000 square foot storefront for a nominal rent, paying a 10 percent commission on sales to the mall, a 10 percent commission to Art Touche and a 10 percent commission to the sales person at the gallery, who will be one of the artists showing their work.

The artists are: Connie Mason Bennett, Niara Isley, Kathy Steventon, Lisa Harrison, Heidi Schaiberger, Maggie Remington, Lisa Marie Jacobs, and Molly Childers. Isley encouraged others to get involved on the Yahoo group site.

“Remington shows originals,” Isley wrote. “But others of us will be hanging up giclee prints of our work rather than originals. Then it is not so critical if something happens.” A giclee print is created using an 8-color or 12-color inkjet printer. An original work of art is scanned or photographed and then digitally printed on paper or canvas.

For Kurtz, Art Touche is a labor of love.

“I’m never going to get rich doing this,” she said. “It’s more of a headache than me just making art, but it’s for exposure and I don’t like working alone.”

If the Art Touche pilot program for the Christmas season is a success, Kurtz hopes to continue the co-op concept.

“I want to create a community where we work collaboratively. I tell artists, if you are serious when you complain that you have no place to show your work, then come and hang your art at the mall.”

artsjournalist l@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs

Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.

Courtesy School of American Research Press Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression and Subversion in Art by Mateo Romero with a foreword by Suzan Shown Harjo, School of American Research Press, 100 pages, 50 color illustrations, $60 hardback, $29.95 paperback.

Courtesy School of American Research Press
“Four Worlds, Four Tides,” Mateo Romeo’s acrylic on canvas from 2000 measures 48 by 72 inches. It appears in his book Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression and Subversion in Art.

Mateo Romero writes of his art and his Pueblo heritage with the same bold, muscular style in which he creates his paintings. His words and images are thick and expressive, forcing the reader to pay attention to Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression and Subversion in Art.

As a non-Indian person, the book exposed me to the fault lines and tragedies afflicting American Indian people today, but more importantly, the fault lines and tragedies afflicting all human beings: conflict, love, war, despair and our need for compassion.

The book begins and ends with poetry, and in between are 50 images of Romero’s paintings and his reasons for creating each work, whether it was the influence of his father’s stories and experiences, the observations of his peers or the exploration of his return to Pueblo culture
and religion. The work is personal and yet universal.

Romero is eloquent, intelligent and passionate. He shares his tragedies and blessings with equal aplomb, expressing them as an objective observer.

Romero describes himself as a plein-air painter of the metaphysical. “Painting the
various stories and parts of the underworld sky is, in essence, a landscape painting,” he writes.

A member of the Cochiti Pueblo, Romero lives with his wife and children in her village at the Pojoaque Pueblo. As an American Indian artist engaged in the process of cultural diaspora and the return to native land and culture, there is anger, frustration, enlightenment and beauty in his words and work. As a person of mixed heritage, I found myself envious of American Indian people’s ability to reclaim their culture. I have no culture. I have no cultural home to which I
can return; it has been destroyed in this melting pot called America.

Romero seems to recognize this as well, and his painting “Cowboy of Troy” from 2002, a mixed media on aluminum flashing on panel, features a red line along the left side, somehow knotted together.

“The vertical red line in the left portion of the piece symbolizes the shared common mortality of all mankind,” Romero writes.

The painting lists all the casualties from the war in Afghanistan – dead, displaced and refugees – the number of casualties from the Sept. 11 attacks and from hate crimes against ethnic minorities. It is the red line that ties us all together. We must come to see that we are all connected.

This, too, is an idea that Romero mentions, borrowing from art historian Bruce Bernstein: “A more complex approach to the contemporary indigenous experience across the globe would be to realize that all native communities have constantly been interacting with other native communities throughout time in a state of cultural synergy, idea exchange, technology exchange and flux.” He goes on to say that in the last 500 years, the mix has included Europeans and the number of indigenous players has become increasingly scarce.

For Romero, some experiences are culturally unique and do not translate into other perspectives or experiences. He explored this idea in an exhibition called “Divergent Worlds.” A painting from that series in 2000, “Four Worlds, Four Tides,” acrylic on canvas, juxtaposes a Pueblo deer dancer against a background of Tide detergent logos. For the artist, “the logo
becomes a signifier for mainstream, corporate, postmodern experience.”

Romero goes on to say that a common misperception about and among American Indian people is that the experience of their ancestors was somehow more authentic, real and culturally relevant than their own current experiences. The mainstream world values the past more than the Indian people value the present.

This is particularly true in the art world, where the work of the past is ensconced in museums while those who create art in the present are discounted.

Painting the Underworld Sky challenges readers to construct meaning by free association with Romero’s words and images. He captures birth and death, war and love, rebirth of culture and dances in his book. He tells intricate, nuanced stories of human existence; these moments and stories are documented in his artwork as well.

“Mateo paints and it is ceremony,” Suzan Shown Harjo writes in her foreword to the
book. I would add, that he writes, and it is ceremony.

lgoebel@centurytel.netLeanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs.

Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.

I spent the last Thursday of October at Jess Leggett’s home in Durango talking about art with Leggett, an abstract painter and collage artist, Niara Isley, a mixed media artist, and Maggie Remington, an earth painter.

The three women are relative newcomers to the Durango arts scene, having all moved here within the last five years. For more than a year, Leggett has talked about getting artists together to support each other. She met Isley at the Durango Arts Center. In September, they invited artists to Isley’s home studio for an inaugural salon to discuss the topic: “Does your art heal?” Six artists attended.

“I have a mission to create a community,” Leggett said. “It takes work. It’s a birthing.”

Leggett and Isley were inspired to start the Last Thursday Arts Salon by a similar group, formed in Pagosa Springs in late 2004. Like Leggett’s group, the Pagosa salon began meeting in homes, but was soon based at Michael Coffee’s ceramic studio and featured monthly speakers.

In February 2005, Coffee started a Yahoo group called ArtsNetwork, to encourage community and collaboration between artists, writers, musicians, performers, arts leaders and people of artistic vision. A few months later, Leggett started DurangoArtists, a Yahoo group site. “Where Durango artists meet to discuss topics related to art and art-making, and help to make Durango a great place to be an artist.”

The Internet group sites are virtual communities where artists can dialogue and share ideas, successes and even disappointments between, or in place of, physical meetings without restrictions of geography and physical location.

I asked the women what they were getting out of their monthly meetings.

Leggett answered: “The knowledge that other artists have similar struggles and problems.” She added that seeing another artist’s studio and exploring their working process was “really neat.”

“We have love, passion and problems in common,” Isley said. “And we are helping to support each other living and selling art. We are all wondering, ‘How do you do this?’”

I value the idea of supporting one another, but I wonder how struggling artists can help each other make a living at selling art?

Supporting and encouraging each other is only one aspect of the process. Honest evaluation and critique of work are important elements, too. Getting advice from those who have already achieved the goal is critical.

Leggett and Isley want to create a group different from the monthly artist gathering at the Durango Art Center. They both enjoy that group, but want something less formal, without a speaker, that allows artists the opportunity to talk freely with one another.

In the future, they’d like to have 10 artists who meet and share regularly from the heart. They want to continue to meet in homes and share their studios at least part of the time. They want to share marketing ideas and concepts with each other and learn from each other how to run the business of art.

“We want to make money at art,” Leggett said.

The Last Thursday Arts Salon is a valuable addition to the Durango art scene. But it shouldn’t take the place of the monthly artist gathering at Durango Art Center where experts talk to artists about issues important to their careers.

As for learning about business and how to make money as an entrepreneur, artists should look to the Small Business Development Center at Fort Lewis College.

The Last Thursday Arts Salon is a place to discuss ideas, feed off the collective creative energy and to be part of a group of artists who will nurture and support your work.

For more information about the Last Thursday Arts Salon, contact Jess Leggett at 259-8998 or e-mail her at leggetts@sis na.com.

To sign up for the Durango Artists Yahoo group send an e-mail to: Durangoartists-sub scribe@yahoogroups.com.

lgoebel@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs.

Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.